Paper Tigers
by broken clavicle
Summary: Because they needed him back and quickly, but nothing ever goes according to plan. /Post "The Bridge"
1. Chapter 1

**disclaimer: **disclaimed.  
**notes: **First _Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D _fanfiction; set after "The Bridge," and will avert from the remainder of the story line and whatnot.  
**notes2: **more than likely will not be updated regularly, seeing as there're other things I'm supposed to be working on right now.

* * *

**.**

Doctor Francesca Stein frowned as she tried to keep a grip on the folders that sat in her lap as the back tire of the SUV dipped into a hole in the pavement, shooting a well deserved glare at the driver, whose sunglasses blocked his eyes from her view.

With a huff, she went back to studying the stack of folders that sat in her lap, fingers finding the edge of the topmost and flipping it open, intent on speed reading through them by the time she got to wherever it was she was going. She held her phone aloft in her other hand, flashlight app powered up and illuminating the files.

The SUV went over another hole in the pavement, back tire dipping in and popping up again.

The files that were in her lap slid and found their way onto the floor in a messy heap, some of them sliding beneath the seats and out of her grasp.

"Could you at least _swerve?_" she bit out, leaning forward and scrabbling to get the files back in her hands.

"Into on-coming traffic? What are you, crazy?" Nick Fury sat in the passenger seat, head twisted to look at the woman in the back seat, who was glaring daggers at the floor, arm most of the way under the seat in front of her, seat belt biting into her neck.

"Just a bit," she answered, sitting back up and attempting to right the files. "But you already knew that."

"How's your reading coming?"

"Shittily." She flipped open the top folder, frowning as she saw the face of Melinda May. "Wasn't aware Coulson pulled May away from her cube. Wouldn't she want to be running point on getting him back?" Doctor Stein looked up at Fury with her eyes, never moving her head from the way it was bent and titled toward the files.

"You know what happened to Coulson during New York. You will be the only medical personnel on board approved for field work. If you find him in a dangerous situation, you're going to be the only one who can get him out of it—you have before, and you can do it again."

Stein frowned, flipping the cover closed on May's folder and shifting it to the bottom pile before hesitating and neglecting to open the one that had been beneath it. "You said there's five members to Coulson's team other than himself. Why do I have three times as many files?"

"Any and all information that we have on Centipede, which isn't much." Stein's frown deepened as she looked up at Fury, hands settling on the tops of the folders. He had taken to looking out the windshield again, though she knew he couldn't see much through the fog and the dark of the night.

"You're telling me that I'm supposed to go and get Coulson based on little to information on a group of people whose identities _we don't know_; a group of people who happen to be manufacturing super humans based on a rather unreliable serum? Not only that, but-"

The SUV went through another handful of holes in the road, cutting off Stein's sentence in favor of a yelp as her head hit the roof of the car. The files flew everywhere again, spilling onto the floor and the seat beside her, sliding about and becoming a disorganized mess.

"Do it again," she growled once the vehicle was back on smooth pavement, "and I will break your neck and throw you out of this car while it is still moving."

"She'll back over your body if you piss her off enough, too," Fury added. "I won't stop her."

"Anyway," Stein began again, moving to gather the folders up a second time, chunks of ginger hair falling into her face. "You're sending me out on a team with a woman whom I don't get along with, an agent who's too pretty for his own good, two scientists who aren't approved for the field aspect of being an agent, and one who was previously a member of the Rising Tide, has betrayed the team once already, and has no real experience with what you need us to do. Am I on the right track?"

"That sounds about right," Fury said, leaning forward in his seat, looking out the windshield into the night. "He handpicked them, though. According to his periodic reports, they're better than we expected them to be." Stein nodded to herself minutely, straining to reach a file that had slid beneath the passenger seat.

"And how long ago was Coulson abducted?"

"Two hours, fifteen minutes."

* * *

The SUV made it to the hangar without hitting any more holes in the road, much to the pleasure of Stein. She had even felt the driver swerve a good few times to avoid any more of the depressions in the pavement.

She unbuckled her seat belt before the SUV had come to a stop, locking her phone and stuffing it into her bra before straightening out the files and tucking them up under her arm. Unlocking the door and pushing it open with her booted foot, she grabbed her duffel bag from where it had sat behind her and slid out of the SUV.

She had seen pictures of the plane before, back when it was still in production. She hadn't been around when Fury had presented Coulson with the finished product. It was precisely how he had wanted it to look, and precisely how she had figured it would—large, black, and boding. The cargo door was open; a handful of nondescript S.H.I.E.L.D agents she didn't recognize were buzzing about, refilling the plane with gas and other items.

She recognized Lola, one of Coulson's prize possessions, sitting in the cargo bay of the plane almost immediately. Just beyond that, she saw the row of five people huddled together, a wall of human bodies that seemed united. Even from the distance, she could tell that they were Coulson's handpicked team of do-gooders.

She shifted her duffel bag on her shoulder as she heard Fury shut the passenger door. Checking to make sure the folders under her arm were safe, she started toward the plane at a brisk pace, Fury following her closely. She knew that the sooner they were in the air, the sooner she could focus one where to begin on finding Coulson, and the sooner she could go back to Montana.

They shifted and mumbled to each other as she and Fury neared; she could feel their gazes studying her, more than likely attempting to gauge who she was and what kind of agenda she had. She knew what they saw when they looked at her—ginger hair pulled into a messy bun, thin frame draped in a frumpy sweater and ill-fitting, wornout jeans, scuffed boots that disappeared beneath the cuffs of said jeans. It wasn't exactly the look of someone who was in a position to be "in charge," but it was also three o'clock in the morning and she had been pulled out of bed with no warning.

She followed Fury up the ramp into the cargo bay, stopping just behind him, only a few feet away from the team she would be commanding on the mission to get Coulson back.

"This is Agent Francesca Stein; she'll be in charge during Coulson's absence until you can get him back on this bus. Her orders will be ironclad, and there will be no arguments," Fury introduced. "She might not look like the best choice for this, but don't underestimate her."

Fury didn't say anything else; he turned and left, knowing that Stein was more than capable of handling things past the introduction.

"Ignore Fury," she said once he was out of earshot, tilting her head up and surveying each of the five people respectively. "It's Doctor, not Agent. Secondly, it's Chess, not Francesca, or Franky, or whatever variation of Francesca you can come up with because my parents didn't think it through when they named me. Thirdly, I won't be in charge for long, because my goal is to find Coulson as quickly as possible."

She had five pairs of eyes on her; she could feel each of them probing, studying her. Quickly, she matched the files with the people, recognizing them by the photos that had been provided by Fury. She knew Agent May, sure; Agent Ward stood next to her, bag of ice held to his head—she'd ask about that later. Next to him was Fitz, then Simmons, and then Skye. The five of them looked exhausted, fidgety, and defensive.

"As I understand it," Stein continued on gently, "you lot have had a rough few hours. You can rest once we're in the air and when you've informed me on what led up to Coulson being abducted. Sound good?"

All she got for an answer was May turning and walking up the stairs; the others quickly followed suit.

Stein frowned, then followed.


	2. Chapter 2

**disclaimer: **disclaimed.

**notes: **parking lots are a bitch and I hate them.

**notes2: **written in an infuriated passion of anger and fury and too many other things to keep track of.

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**.**

She followed them up the stairs quietly, weary and bone-tired, files like a weight under her arm, a stark reminder of why she was there and what needed to be done. She could feel her clothes and personal items shifting in her duffel bag against her side, the top of the shotgun she had stashed inside biting into her rib cage.

She had been over the files in her arms, absorbed only some of the information, and had picked up nothing that could put her on the trail of Centipede. From what she had seen, they only had singular names, names that couldn't be traced, locations picked at random with no pattern, not a single paper trail to be seen. It was almost like they didn't exist at all, but she knew they did—Mike Peterson and the tech attached to him was evidence enough of that.

They wouldn't be able to find Coulson if all they had to go on were chance encounters at random intervals. If they wasted too much time, it would go from a rescue mission to a recovery mission, and she was fairly certain it would be too late to bring him back from the dead again. Time was, as always, of the essence, but especially so in this case.

And, from the looks of things, time wasn't on their side.

Stein had not been prepared for the spacious area that met her gaze when she walked through the doorway, hearing it slide close behind her and lock with a soft click. What met her eyes was modern and simple, dark colors mixed and balanced perfectly with the light.

Coulson's team had already assembled themselves on the various chairs and couches only a few feet beyond the door they had come through, faces somber and postures defensive, their shoulders tense and jaws tight.

After a moment of hesitation, she sat her duffel bag behind the nearest couch, placing the file folders on top of it. She'd look over them in more depth later, like when the bus was up in the air and the team was resting.

"What happened?" Stein asked into the silence, airy voice cutting through the palpable tension in the room. Coulson's team continued to stare at the floor as she walked quietly out from behind the couch to lean with her back in a corner, in a position to survey only three fifths of the group from her vantage point.

"Coulson was abducted by Centipede," May explained without preamble. Stein couldn't help herself—she rolled her eyes. Melinda May was always quick and to the point; she knew that.

"I picked up on that already," Stein said dryly. "I also know there was some kind of bridge explosion involved. What I _need_ to know is _why_ you were on the bridge in the first place, and why Coulson was in a position to be abducted without much of a fight, seeing as the only one who looks even a little worse for the wear is pretty boy with the ice bag. Also, why did the bridge explode?"

"We were supposed to be making an exchange—Mike Peterson for his son Ace," May elaborated, bringing her head up to level a gaze on Stein. Had the situation been different—if it had been anybody but Coulson, really—she would have grinned cheekily. As it was, though, she opted to keep her expression neutral. "Coulson went with him to make the exchange, but we were off coms. Somehow, Centipede wound up with Coulson and Peterson came back to us with his son. When Peterson tried to go back for Coulson, the bridge exploded."

After a moment, Stein pushed herself away from the wall, sticking her hands into the pockets of her jeans and walking slowly toward the opposite wall, watching Coulson's team closely. "So what you're basically saying is that you lost _two_ S.H.I.E.L.D. Agents in less than five minutes. And Fury's _still_ letting you into the field?" She made a vague noise in disbelief, tossing her head to the side a bit. "He would have had me tarred and feathered and dragged through H.Q. And then he would probably drown me."

Upon reaching the opposite side of the plane, she turned on her heel and strutted back the way she came, digging her fingers through the fabric of her pockets and into the space that joined her legs to her hips. "Although, I have been told that the lot of you work pretty well together, and have been pretty lucky when it comes to close calls." She stopped walking when she drew about even with where Agent May sat, turning to face the five members of Coulson's team.

"Let's just hope that luck lasts."

* * *

The white couch in the main area of the plane was quite comfortable—nearly as comfortable as the mattress she slept on in her flat in Virginia when she was working with S.H.I.E.L.D., but not quite as comfortable as the bed she had at her parent's ranch in Montana. She had managed to find a spare blanket in a closet at some portion of the plane, long after the team had taken to their cabins to rest.

She had figured that they wouldn't go back up into the air on the bus just yet, not until most of them had clear heads and had rested a good while; she was already busy trying to work out what they were going to _do_ when it came to looking for Coulson. The world was a large place to search, and Centipede had popped up in some far, far places.

Sunrise found her sitting up, blanket pooled around her waist and the sleeves of her sweater pushed up haphazardly to her elbows. A few of the files Fury had sent her aboard with were stacked neatly on the cushion next to her—she hadn't been through those yet. The ones she had been through had been carelessly tossed aside, laying about here and there for her to pick up later.

Stein had a few folders open in her lap, a spiral notebook whose pages were covered in near unintelligible squiggles balanced on one knee, pen in her mouth, and her phone in her hand. Her other hand was beneath her chin, holding up her head. She had spotted a few oddities throughout some of the files, things she couldn't put her thumb on but didn't sit well with her. During her reading, thoughts had also struck her, vague, half-formed ideas she had scribbled into the margins that might potentially help narrow the search for Coulson. According to her clock, he had been missing for nearly six hours.

She heard a noise, jerking her head up from where she had it bent over the files, unsurprised to find Melinda May sitting across from her, surveying her coolly.

"It seems like every time you lot run into Centipede, it's a chance encounter," she said around the pen, looking back down at her lap and the assortment of materials she had there. May rarely spoke to her first, so she had to take the initiative. "Randomized and mostly unplanned on both parts. Neither party seems to go actively looking for each other; not until the last time, at least, and that didn't end too well. You said they were in a helicopter when they took Coulson away?"

She looked up in time to see May nod once, sharply, in confirmation. Stein bit down on her lip, then looked back to her notes. "They could have only made it so far in the helicopter—they would have run out of fuel, but probably would have had a plane waiting somewhere in a reasonable distance for another getaway. Or maybe cars. In this case, both seem to be decent options, but there's only one we can _really _look into, which is the plane option. Then there's the third possibility—that they set up a safe house in an appropriate distance to the bridge."

"All of that depends on why they took Coulson," the older female agent provided bluntly.

"Exactly," Stein agreed, spitting the pen out of her mouth. It landed in her lap, narrowly missing the files waiting there. "I can hardly imagine that they took him for his collection of vintage Captain America cards. More than likely, they would want him for information. But information about what?" She looked back up to view May, tilting her head to the side, thinking.

There were only so many places one could go in six hours, even if they had head starts.

**.**

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**notes3: **I hate the holiday season. It makes me feel like shit.

**Notes4: **you guys are lovely, and I love you, and you people are flawless.


	3. Chapter 3

**disclaimer: **disclaimed.

**notes:** I don't know what I'm doing or where I'm going with this; I'm winging it.

**notes2: **some of this was giving me problems; tell me if it's clunky?

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**.**

"Anyone have any ideas on why Centipede would want Coulson?" They were back to where they had been before, the five members of Coulson's team arranged on the chairs and couches. Stein had cleaned up her mess and folded up her blanket, leaving most of her things on top of her duffel bag.

Currently, she was sitting on the floor just a few feet away from the group, pen in her hand and notebook balanced on her knee. She had cleaned up some of the notes, organized them in her own unorganized way. Her handwriting was still a mess, stretched oddly across the pages and crammed onto the very edges of the paper. It was a miracle she could read her own handwriting on most occasions.

She had started a list of reasons why Centipede would want the once-dead man. So far, she had only one bullet point, and that had been scratched out hastily since it was the least likely reason: His extensive collection of Captain America memorabilia.

No one answered her question. She knew that they would all be in the awkward stage with her for a long time—more than likely would be until she was off the bus and Coulson was back in their midst. The oddest thing was, the only one who seemed even accepting of her presence on the bus was May, and the two of them hardly tolerated each other on good days.

But things had changed since the last time the two of them had crossed paths, and Stein could see that clearly. Something had happened to the Calvary, had taken her insides and twisted them about even more than they had been before.

"I highly doubt it was for his knowledge of _Super Nanny_," Stein quipped, trying to get a rise out of anyone, eyes flicking between them all to gauge if they were listening to her or not. As it happened, four heads whipped in her direction, glaring at her for making a joke at a time like they were in.

"Oh," she said innocently, straightening her back until her spine popped in eight different places. "You guys _are_ listening, good. I thought you were lost in an eternal state of brooding and pouting, neither of which are good if we're going to get Coulson back as a person and not a corpse. Now if you will please _stop_ _feeling sorry _for whatever mistakes were made on the bridge, that would be great. It's in the past; you can't change it. There's no way to know if it could have turned out any differently. Brooding on it and focusing on it and thinking through it is _pointless_.

"Pick yourselves up. Pull it together. Sitting here, feeling bad for letting him get abducted is counter productive. Come on, come on, _come on_. Throw some ideas at me, let's get this _going_. The longer we tiptoe about the subject, the longer Coulson is in enemy hands. And the longer Coulson is in enemy hands, the lower the chances we have of finding him alive."

Stein understood that they had had a traumatic experience just a few hours ago, and it was typical that the only highly experienced member of the team had it all together. If she had had it her way, the five other people on the airplane wouldn't be on the team at all—they were too close to the situation, too inexperienced.

Although, as Fury had pointed out, a majority of S.H.I.E.L.D. thought Coulson was dead and would therefore be no help at all. All of the other high ranking agents that knew the truth about Coulson were too busy as well, which left her with the green horns and Agent May.

She was not going to baby them—she had given them a small reprieve, but it was time to hit the ground running.

"Now, does _anyone_ have any idea why Centipede wou-"

"_Why_ are you forcing the issue so much?" Stein's head whipped in the direction the voice had come, somewhat surprised too see that it had come from Skye. Her eyes were red rimmed, though she appeared to have done her best to put herself together before she had come out of her cabin. "Mike's dead, Coulson's gone, Ward was shot—can't we just _rest_ and let S.H.I.E.L.D. take care of the rest of it?"

Stein quirked an eyebrow and smirked at the young woman—only a few years age difference between the two of them, she was sure. "If it hasn't occurred to you yet, you _are_ a part of S.H.I.E.L.D and-"

And then she completely registered Skye's words. "Wait, what? There was_ shooting_ involved and no one told me that eight hours ago?" Her head swerved over to May, who nodded once she knew she had the younger woman's gaze on her. Then Stein looked at Ward, pushing her notebook off of her lap and leaning forward, elbows on her knees.

"You were _shot__?_" she asked, watching him closely.

"I was wearing a vest." The words were said slowly, with hesitation.

"So you're good for field duty?" She could understand why it would be withheld from her; he was the only muscle there was, other than May. Which, when one thought most of that out, it equated to the fact that the only people authorized for field action two slight women who hadn't seen as much field action as they could have during the course of their time as agents.

He looked startled for a moment before he nodded slowly, frowning. He expected something else to come out of her mouth, more than likely something along the lines of, "Sorry, buddy, you have to sit this one out." But if there was one thing Francesca Stein was not, it was stupid.

"Then whatever," she said flippantly, quickly checking the time on her phone. "It happened, you're alive. Now, if there aren't any more protests, can we get back to finding Coulson?"

Stein picked her notebook back up off of the floor and balanced it on her right knee, picking her pen up with her left hand and getting ready to write down whatever ideas anyone had come up with. All of the other extraction operation she had gone on, all of the other ones she had run point on—there had been much, much more information than what they were going on now.

According to her phone when she had checked it just seconds before, Coulson had been gone for almost nine hours.

Time was running out; unfortunately, Stein was well aware of the fact that they had wasted a good five hour chunk of time that could have been spent doing what they were doing now, but she was dreadfully aware of what exhaustion and guilt could do.

"Why do we need to know why they took him?" Skye asked after a few moments of silence—moments that Stein had filled by casting her gaze about all five members of Coulson's team, waiting to see if any of them had something to offer. "Shouldn't we be busy _looking _for him instead of wondering _why_?"

Stein's whiskey colored eyes slid to Skye, tapping her chin with her pen.

"Because _where _they took him depends on the why. Do they want to run tests? Do they want to torture him for answers? Maybe they want him long term, instead of contacting S.H.I.E.L.D with a ransom or off the wall demands. If we can ascertain a couple of reasons as to why Centipede took Coulson, then we can narrow down on our ideas as to where they took Coulson," Stein explained carefully, mind working on something else as she talked.

There were contacts that she had that might have known something, people who weren't allied with any known organization; people who _heard_ things, saw things, were aware of things in the under ground. She could get into contact with some of them, certainly, especially if Centipede hadn't taken Coulson far. If she could just-

"New York."

Stein's head whipped to where Simmons was sitting on the couch next to Fitz. The woman looked just as worse for wear as Skye did, though a little better held together.

"What about New York?" she asked the scientist slowly, stopping the tapping of her pen.

"Coulson died in New York, correct? What if they want to know how he's still alive?" Simmons probed cautiously, avoiding eye contact with Stein.

"But Coulson's death was classified information—only a handful of people even know he's alive," Fitz argued.

"Even if that's what this was about, how could Centipede find out? It's classified information, isn't it?" Skye said, looking between FitzSimmons, May, and Stein.

"That would mean that S.H.I.E.L.D. Has a mole," May said bluntly, eyes meeting Stein's.

"It's happened before," the medical doctor conceded airily, glancing back down at her notebook. It was completely possible for Centipede to have a mole on the inside, an agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. But who in their right mind would betray them, especially if they had clearance high enough to read _that_ file?

Or, at least, the parts of it that weren't redacted.

"Why would they want Coulson for _that_, though?" Ward questioned. "He was dead for less than a minute; the medical personnel on the Helicarrier brought him back and fixed him up. So why would Centipede want him for something a doctor can do?"

There was a lull for a moment before Stein said:

"It wasn't a few seconds."

Five pairs of eyes tilted in her direction. She chose to set her gaze on the floor, spinning the pen lazily with her fingers.

"Coulson was dead for four hours, twenty six minutes, and forty two seconds."

**.**

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**notes3: **use that cute little box down there to drop by and say hi?

**notes4: **you're all lovely.


	4. Chapter 4

**disclaimer: **disclaimed.

**notes: **oh gosh. i feel like i'm spoiling you guys. i really don't update like this.

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**.**

She had been on the Helicarrier on the day Coulson died.

She was a precaution, as Fury had put it. A "just in case anything goes wrong and we need some help" kind of thing. She hadn't really wanted to go up in the air on the Helicarrier, surrounded by agents she didn't know in a place that was completely unfamiliar to her.

Lo and behold, something bad _had_ happened, and even when she looked back on it, she wasn't sure if it was some kind of macabre plan of Fury's to get the Avengers to successfully work together or if it was an accident on S.H.I.E.L.D's part.

Of course, Fury had more than prepared her for the possibility that someone would die. He wasn't oblivious—he knew what command had authorized, what kind of research they were funding for Francesca Stein in her free time. He was well aware of the rats and the pigs and the goats she had experimented on, the ones she had cut open and sewn back up and injected with her blood. He knew about her personal blood bank, the fridge she had full of bags of her own blood, because her experiments were _working_.

But then Fury had wanted her to try it on Coulson, something she hadn't even thought about doing. She didn't even know if it would work on people, hadn't gotten that far in her experiments because there was no _way_ S.H.I.E.L.D was going to give her a few people to cut up and bring back to life.

Even though her research was TOP SECRET, the fact that she was on the Index wasn't, as well as what she could do. She didn't think it was honestly that "super," but it was enough to get her placed on the Index without hesitation.

Because, when Francesca Stein was only eight and her parents still called her Franky, she had taken a bullet to the head and was subsequently stuffed into a meat locker. She had noticed the oddities before then, sure—she would get scratched by the cat or get a paper cut or skin her knee, and the injury would be gone seconds later.

She hadn't been aware that it would extend to bullet holes in the brain, but it had. As she found out later, it extended to her heart, to her limbs being blown off. Everything would heal, her body would go back to the way it was before. Her skin wouldn't even retain the pigment of a tan, and it would reject tattoo ink, healing over like it was never there in the first place. She didn't have any scars or stretch marks, no history written on her body.

It was like she was a blank canvas that rejected any and all kinds of paint thrown at it.

According to the tests S.H.I.E.L.D had run after the "welcome wagon" had acquired her, it was totally possible for her to drown. Otherwise, the only real possibility that they had discovered for her to die was if they were to separate her head from her body.

And there was _no way_ they were going to test that.

It wasn't until after she had been entered into the Index that people started calling her Frankenstein. It had started out as whispers behind her back as S.H.I.E.L.D continued testing her, then started her education at the Academy much, much too early. But it wasn't like she had a home to go back to, so she rolled with the punches as S.H.I.E.L.D practically mapped out her life.

They had mucked up paperwork for her when she was sixteen, sent her off to college and then medical school while still being an active agent on the side. It had made for a hectic, busy life, but it to0k her mind off of the fact that she was Not Normal and that she was always going to be Not Normal.

So instead, she became a doctor for S.H.I.E.L.D and earned the name that she had been branded with at the age of eight: Doctor Frankenstein.

* * *

"You're the one who put him back together?" May asked after a moment of silence. Stein knew the woman was terrific at hiding things—especially when they considered pranks—and now was no different. She had no way to tell how May was going to react if she ever figured out _how_ she did it.

And she was going to find out, someway, somehow, even though Stein knew that _that _part was always going to stay classified, so long as it wasn't important to the matter at hand.

"Of course." Agent Phil Coulson had been part of the welcome wagon that had first taken her to S.H.I.E.L.D, a week after she had taken a bullet straight through her brain. The wound had still been healing then, all of the tissue and muscle of her brain knitting back together; her motor skills had been poor at best at that point in time, given the damage to her cranium. She felt like she owed him a debt, honestly—he had treated her like a person instead of some weird creature, even though the skin where the bullet had entered her forehead was still torn and puckered.

"That would have been impossible—there would have been nothing left after that long, no signs of life. Unless properly stored, his heart and his brain wouldn't have been able to function again," Fitz rationalized quickly; Simmons was nodding her agreement.

Before she could open her mouth to elaborate, though, Stein jumped in. "Don't question how," she said quickly. "Really, just don't. It will never make sense. Not for a long, long time."

Stein had her phone balanced on her knee as her booted foot pushed down on the accelerator just a little more. Her duffel bag with the files, the shotgun, and her notebook was in the backseat. She had taken out her handgun and strapped it to her thigh before she, May and Ward had left the S.H.I.E.L.D maintained facility.

Considering they had no leads as to where or why Centipede had taken Coulson, Stein figured it was about time to hit up some of her former informants, the vagabonds who knew the underground of the states like they knew their own hands. There was almost nothing that got past them, whether it be seen or heard.

She had opted to leave Skye and FitzSimmons back on the bus, where they would be more useful. Stein had asked them to go through street cameras, satellite images, _anything_ to see if they could get a good look at Reina, or Coulson, or any other known member of Centipede. Maybe someone had slipped up and let themselves be seen on camera. It was a small chance, but it was a chance nonetheless.

"The last time you drove one of these, you rammed through a wall and hit five people," May recalled dryly once they were firmly on the road and on their way into the city. Stein was pushing the needle of the speedometer up and up and up past the speed limit, fully aware that the local police force wouldn't dare pull over an SUV with the S.H.I.E.L.D. emblem emblazoned on either side.

"The last time I drove one of these, I wasn't considered a soccer mom," Stein shot back; she could hear Ward shifting in the back seat, almost like he was leaning forward to listen a little closer.

Out of the corner of her eye, she could see May's lip curl up in what she supposed was a wry smile. Stein almost drove the car off of the road—May knew her history; it was the main reason they didn't quite get along.

But she kept the SUV on the pavement and her eyes on the road, pressing her foot down on the accelerator just a little more.

**.**

* * *

**notes2: **slow build; sorry.

**notes3: **if you spot anything wonky, tell me?


	5. Chapter 5

**disclaimer: **disclaimed.

**notes: **i'm a competitive writer; when I don't have anyone to word count battle with, I lose my flow and get distracted.

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**.**

The warehouse was worn down, decrepit, covered in poorly executed graffiti. Nearly every window was broken and boarded up with old pieces of cardboard and a few soggy pieces of plywood. Some of them had had plastic over them, but now the plastic hung limp and lifeless, waiting for the next breeze to come along and bring it back to life.

Stein put the SUV into park, turning the key in the ignition so the engine would cut off.

"You can drive, right?" she asked, turning her her seat to look at Ward, one hand still on the steering wheel while the other reached for her duffel bag. The zipper was already undone; she hadn't bothered to close it all the way when she had dragged it off of the bus.

"Yes." She withdrew her hand from the innards of her duffel bag, sawed off shotgun and a few shells in hand. The extra weapon that she couldn't really hide was just a precaution, of course—a "you had better talk or else I will not hesitate to pull this trigger" kind of incentive.

"Good." Stein swiveled back around in her seat, opening up the shotgun to load it quickly with two rounds of buckshot. "Have it running; always hard to tell what's going to happen in there."

She opened her door, pushing it open with her foot at the same time May jumped out and shut her door quietly. Just as she was crawling out, she stopped and poked her head back it. "Also," Stein said, motioning to her phone that lay quiet on the dashboard, "if that rings, and the name is something like "The Sound" or "The Fury," answer it. It'll be Fury, or Maria Hill. If it's anyone else, just ignore it, no matter what."

And then she slid out of the car completely, boots making a small splashing noise as she landed in a puddle. She closed the driver door most of the way, leaving it open just a little bit for Ward to jump in—he was a tall man, and with the injuries he had likely taken via bullet proof vest would have made it difficult for him to crawl into the front between the two seats.

Not that she recommended attempting that, especially because the SUV was already in park and completely off.

Stein walked around the front of the car and then past May, jerking her head in he direction she was walking in, motioning for May to follow. Stein didn't bother to look over her shoulder at the older woman, fully aware that she was following.

They had done it so many times before, walking one in front of the other in enemy territory, though the roles were often reversed. Stein couldn't quite figure the woman out, not anymore. She supposed that having a desk job had changed her, but so had earning the name the Calvary.

Of course, Stein wasn't fully aware of what had happened in order for her get branded with _that_ nickname. She hadn't been with S.H.I.E.L.D at the time. She had been with the lovely people who had legally adopted her and had kept her while she wasn't being experimented on when S.H.I.E.L.D had first added her to the Index, up in the mountains of Montana where she felt safe.

That incident had occurred only a few months after Stein had left. She hand't returned for S.H.I.E.L.D for at least another year after that.

There was more graffiti the farther the two woman walked, most of it washed away and worn down, other bits of it covered up with newer spray paint: Gangs marking their turf, hooligans vandalizing just because they could, street artists practicing their craft.

Stein had to admit, some of it was tasteful—pretty, even. But other bits? Other bits she didn't like so much, the bits that spelled out obscenities in large, colorful, eye catching letters.

There was a side door to the warehouse, the one Stein knew was left unlocked from her last visit to the place. Of course, it wasn't unlocked by choice—she had had to use force last time, and now there was nothing that could latch the door in place.

Nothing about said door really stood out, unless one was to count the old, crusty blood stains on it that hadn't been there before, 0r the way it hung at an angle, rusted off of it's hinges. She wasn't entirely sure what the place had been used for before it had gone out of business—some kind of plant that hadn't done so well, she supposed.

Carefully, shotgun at the ready, Stein toed the door open cautiously, staying close to it just in case. Peering into the gloomy interior of the abandoned building, she cocked the gun, bringing the butt of it up to her shoulder. The noise it made was loud, grating, echoing throughout the large, single room of the warehouse.

Up in the rafters, some birds took off—others shifted, squawked, but stayed where they were.

Taking a deep breath and seeing nothing, Stein entered the building cautiously, May just behind her. The feel of the butt of her shotgun in the space of her shoulder kept her grounded and helped keep her mind on the matter. She had been a decent field agent at best, nothing to write home to mom about, before she had taken a temporary retirement of sorts. She had always been a better strategist, her mind working faster than her body parts did.

S.H.I.E.L.D had only put her in the field in the first place because her ability to take a bullet wound and not be perturbed by it and keep on going. Otherwise, she had average reflexes and knee jerk reactions. She had always been more of a sidelines, "keep the car running just in case we have to run," kind of agent.

Not that she minded, of course. Cars were warm, easy to handle, and there was very little chance of someone ambushing you in one.

Stein couldn't make much out in the poor lighting of the mostly-abandoned warehouse. The birds were silhouettes far above her, and the floor beneath her feet was covered in a massive accumulation of bird feces. A handful of the feathery creatures would coo every few moments, while others would ruffle their feathers at the near-silent noise of the two women ghosting across the floor far bel0w.

She stopped and tilted her head, throwing her hand out in a sign for May to stop, as she heard something skitter across the floor.

Her eyes tricked to pick things out in the poor light, inconsistencies that could spell out danger. There were lumps of trash, piles of old rags and dirty blankets and old take out boxes; plastic bags were laid out on the floor here and there, but nothing really stuck out to her as she surveyed their surroundings quickly.

May's hand was on her shoulder, and then the woman's other hand came into her view, pointing to a corner. Stein's eyes shot to it, zeroing in on something that she might not have seen. It took her a heartbeat before she could see a shape, huddled up in the corner.

She saw it move, just barely, as she watched.

After a quick, shared look with May, Stein began to walk forward cautiously, carefully placing her feet on the damp concrete—she had no desire to slip and land in bird shit, thank you very much. She kept the shotgun leveled at the heap, trigger finger light as a feather, ready to pull back and fire at any given moment.

Above, some of the birds took flight.

The lumpy, huddled shape became clearer and clearer as she approached, different things coming into a clean focus the closer she and May got—it was a person, obviously; she could make out the bend of a leg, a hand pressed up against the wall, another hand over a face.

"Hello?" she asked softly when she was well within an accurate firing range of the form. She could feel May's frown, heavy and speaking volumes as the other woman glared at her back. "Jeremy?"

The hand moved off of the face, revealing a scruffy beard and dark, dark brown eyes. "I am the _Pelican_," the man hissed, baring his yellowing, decaying teeth at her. "I have control over _birds_."

Stein fought the urge to roll her eyes and heave a sigh, instead just opting to shake her head slightly in pity.

"No, you don't," she staid sternly, crouching down on the ground so she was on the man's eye level. "You do remember me, though, right Jeremy?"

She saw the man squint at her very, very hard. So hard that his eyes almost closed. She knew that visibility was difficult in the building, but even more so when the man's eye sight was going.

"O-of course, Miss Chess." Stein let an easy grin slip across her face—she had left a lasting impression on the man the last time she had seen him, in the same warehouse that they were in now. There had been less birds, though.

When it came to introductions, Francesca Stein never introduced herself as Francesca Stein. It was always Chess, and Chess alone. Chess was shorter, easier than Francesca, and it didn't hold the putrid memories and the irony that Franky held.

So, Chess it was.

"Good. Now, what do you know about Centipede, Jeremy?"

The man flinched, then squirmed around on the floor a little, bracing his back against the moist wall of the building. He was avoiding eye contact, looking anywhere but where May and Stein stood. Stein noted silently, in the back of her mind, that he kept glancing to somewhere just over her left shoulder, like he as _looking_ at something.

"They're prone to dehydration," Jeremy spilled quickly; his hands were shaking, and his eye had gained a nervous kind of twitch.

Stein frowned. "No, no—not the bug, Jeremy. The _organization_ Centipede. Now, what do you know about them? Come on, speak."

He shut his eyes tightly, face scrunching up in an effort to convey to Stein that he didn't want to say anything. His hands were scrabbling for a hold on the sweaty wall, legs lashing out.

After a moment, he cracked his eyes open again, almost like he was checking to see if the two women were still there.

"Do I have to break your legs again? Because last time wasn't too fun for you, if I recall correctly," Stein said sweetly, titling her head to the side and cradling the shotgun, making sure to make her movements obvious enough to draw his attention to the weapon in her hands.

He gulped, eyes tracing the weapon in a weary manner. She could see him shaking in his clothes, beads of sweat beginning to form on his forehead.

"N-n-n-no, Miss Chess. Not need to do that a'tall," he stuttered out, voice wavering and breaking as he tried to fight his fear and ascertain whether or not Stein was bluffing.

Of course, he had thought she was bluffing when she had broken his legs, so he should have known better by now.

"Now, tell me and tell me true, Jeremy. What do you know about Centipede?"

A few heartbeats passed before the man spoke again, cautiously as he shut his eyes tight.

"They took one of your friends," he whispered, body relaxing a bit as he reached up to stroke the old, ratty hat he wore atop his head, other hand burying itself in the two scarves he wore around his neck for warmth. "And then they blew up the bridge."

"Very good, Jeremy," Stein said with a smile, relaxing her grip a bit on the shotgun. "What else do you know about Centipede?"

She could see his jaw working; he knew something, but he was debating with himself on whether or not he should divulge such information. And there, again, he glanced over her shoulder at something.

As an incentive for him to make up his mind just a little faster, Stein tightened her grip on her shotgun, tilting the barrel in his direction.

"Can't say, can't say, can't say," he muttered, shaking his head and tucking his chin down against his chest. His hands were tightening into fists, flesh gripping flesh as he pulled his legs into his body, trying to compact himself into the corner his back was in.

"Why can't you say?" Stein knew that, when dealing with people like this, one had to treat them with a sense of decorum while still being gentle. Of course, she treated children the same way—like they were adults, but not.

Jeremy stayed silent, shaking his head and pulling his hat down around his ears, like he was trying to block Stein's voice out of his head.

"They're prone to dehydration," Jeremy repeated. His knuckles were white from where he was gripping his hat and pulling down—Stein was sure the old, worn material would rip if he put anymore force into his grip. "Dehydration, dehydration, dehydration."

Stein frowned, then looked up at May. The other agent's face was unreadable, just like Stein had expected.

With a sigh, Stein stood, cradling her shotgun in the crook of her elbow, the safety firmly engaged. She pulled her wallet out of her back pocket with her other hand, then pulled out a few bills.

She set them on the floor carefully, keeping her eyes on Jeremy as she did so. He was still repeating the word "dehydration" like it meant something _more_ than what she knew it did.

"Go get some food, Jeremy," she said when she righted herself. Then, she put the butt of the shotgun back into her shoulder and, with a nod to May, began backing out the way they had come in.

The two female agents met no resistance other than bird poop all over the bottoms of their shoes as they walked cautiously out of the mostly-abandoned building. Stein was watching the area around her, looking for anything else to move, to jump out, to _get her_.

But nothing moved, and she shut the door behind her as best she could once they were totally out. Heaving a sigh, she looked at May before they started heading back to the SUV, stepping in unison. She could hear the engine of the vehicle running, see the trail of exhaust running out of the pipe.

They were halfway there when the building exploded behind them.

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**notes2: **two words for you, kids: word. sprints. they're the reason this chapter is so marvelously long, and the only reason it's done.

**notes3: **Jeremy and the whole "I'm the _Pelican_" thing were what actually inspired this, for the most part. Of course, it ended differently, especially since when I first thought about it, Stein shot him in both knees _before_ she semi-interrogated him. Except, you know, he was much, much more flamboyant and had a warehouse full of flamingos.

**notes4: **you guys are awesome.


	6. Chapter 6

**disclaimer: **disclaimed.

**notes: **annnnd, we're moving along!

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**.**

"Dude," Skye exclaimed, leaning over the table to get a better look at the screen that hung on the wall. "They call her _Frankenstein_, like the doctor." FitzSimmons stood on either side of her, their eyes trained on the screen as well. "Fury didn't mention she was a Super! 'Accelerated regeneration,' or whatever that is."

Francesca Stein's picture was up on the screen, the bits of her file that weren't redacted next to it. Her picture was a few years old, ginger hair wavy and hanging far out of the picture. Her hair was cut to frame her face, bits of it swooping over her right eye and falling into her face. She wasn't smiling, which seemed to be typical with most photos of S.H.I.E.L.D agents. She looked rather disgruntled, though, like the photographer had said something she hadn't expected just seconds before taking the picture.

"Aren't we supposed to be looking for Coulson?" Simmons asked, eyes glancing down at the table before looking back up to the screen at the wall.

"Yeah, yeah," Skye said distractedly, still reading Stein's file. "The facial recognition program is running in the background—for his face, and Reina's. It'll pop up if it gets anything."

Admittedly, there wasn't much to the file on Francesca Stein. There was her picture and a couple of off-handed things about her ability. It listed her current S.O as Director Nick Fury, and her former S.O as Melinda May. But otherwise?

Otherwise, it was all redacted.

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Stein hit the ground hard, shotgun flying out of her hands, the heat from the blast rolling over her body in waves as the force sent her skidding a few inches across the pavement. She could feel her skin tearing away from the muscles, feel the blood springing forward—but she could also feel it patching itself back together.

Her abilities had improved over the years. It took a matter of seconds for her face to put itself back together after being dragged across pavement and concrete—a matter of less than a minute if her body was repairing a knife wound that had torn muscles.

It took her the better part of an hour to regrow a limb, though, and a day for her brain and head to pull itself back together. S.H.I.E.L.D had kept on studying her, though it was only at odd intervals at that point.

In a matter of seconds, she was back up on her feet again, looking around blindly as she blinked, trying to get her vision to adjust itself. A number of feet ahead of her was a kneeling Melinda May—she was much, much faster than Stein was on her feet, though she wasn't entirely sure what the other woman had gotten ahead of her.

For the most part, she looked unscathed.

Without waiting a second more, Stein took off toward the SUV—Ward, she could see, had already opened the passenger door. Currently, he was running in their direction.

Clumsily, Stein picked up her shotgun while she was still moving toward May, who was working herself into a standing position.

She reached May before Ward did, grabbing her by the elbow and jerking her head toward the SUV. The other woman didn't need any more of an incentive—she took off toward the SUV at a brisk pace, nearly dragging Stein along behind her.

Stein's own footsteps were clumsily, actions still marred from the shock of her fall. What the hell had gone wrong? Why had the building exploded?

Better yet, _how_ had it exploded?

Stein couldn't think straight, even as May pushed her into the passenger seat, jerked the shotgun from her hands, and slammed the door, jumping into the back herself. Ward was in the driver seat almost immediately, putting the vehicle into drive and gunning the engine. She was aware that leaving the scene of something like this was bad, bad news, and that they shouldn't be _leaving_.

And then she remembered that she had ate a good deal of pavement and a good portion of her face had been cut up and burned from the friction, and that Normal People didn't quite heal like she did. That, and they were on a pretty tight schedule themselves.

Hunching up her shoulders, she reached an arm behind her, pulling her sweater over her head in one quick jerk before bundling it up and holding it to her face—she was still bleeding quite a bit, and she didn't really want to get blood all over the innards of the SUV.

She stretched her arm out in front of her, swiping her phone off of the dashboard and unlocking it quickly. She had bits of dirt on her hand from the concrete, quickly drying blood streaking and speckling her pale flesh from where she had caught the heel of her hand and her forearm on the pavement.

Stein pressed the phone to the side of her head that lacked her sweater, cradling the cellular device in the nook between her neck and her shoulder.

Fury picked up on the second ring.

"There's a situation someone should probably come and take care of," she said quickly, adjusting her grip on her sweater. Her tongue felt a little heavy in her mouth, and everything sounded rather muted to her ears—both would sort themselves out in a matter of moments, she was sure.

"What kind of situation?" Fury asked slowly. He always knew he probably wouldn't like her answer when she gave it, no matter what kind of situation she had been sent to.

"A blown up building kind of situation, sir. Which—and I will maintain this for a long, long time because it's _true—_was totally not my fault, nor was it Agent May's fault. It just kind of . . . _exploded._"

"No injuries?"

"Just me," she said quickly. The back of the seat was cold against her flesh—she had neglected to throw anything on under her sweater other than her bra when she had been rudely roused from her bed earlier that day. "And an informant of mine who was in the building at the time of the, uh, detonation."

She twisted her body around so that she could see in the back seat, leaning forward between the two front ones. May looked a little out of it, and there was only a small amount of blood on her face from a cut just above her eye. "May's just got minor wounds," she continued quickly. "And the explosion was _totally_ not my fault this time, I swear."

"Did you at least find Coulson?"

"Uh, no." Stein leaned farther between the seats, dipping her left hand into her duffel bag and pulling out a clean sweater. "Nope, no idea where Coulson is. We did, however, discover that the insect kind of centipede is prone to dehydration."

Instead of responding to her words or giving her an affirmative that he had heard her, Fury opted to hang up the phone.

With a huff, Stein righted herself in her seat, dropping her phone and her clean sweater into her lap before pulling down the visor. Cautiously, she peeled her dirty sweater away from her face, unsurprised to see that it had stopped bleeding and was mostly healed.

Shaking her head, she pushed the visor back up before pulling her clean sweater over her head and down to her waist, fighting to get her arms in the sleeves that were four inches too long for her arms.

Nothing wanted to go right, did it?

**.**

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**notes2: **that cute little box down there is lonely.


	7. Chapter 7

**disclaimer: **disclaimed.

**notes: **lemonade is my brain food.

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**.**

"That is one hideous sweater."

Stein stopped walking and looked down at her front. The sweater in question was the one she had placed on her body in the SUV. It was bright red and green, with dancing reindeer on the front and decorated Christmas trees lining the bottom. If she pressed a button that was inside one of the sleeves, the trees would light up and so would the reindeer noses.

She frowned, then looked back up to the person who had said the offending words. "It's _cute_," she stressed. "And it won me the ugly sweater contest last year at the S.H.I.E.L.D Christmas party!" Of course, most of the S.H.I.E.L.D agents that attended the annual Christmas party didn't have much of imaginations, nor did they have a six year old to help them pick one out.

She had been only a little offended that she had won the ugly sweater contest.

Ward shook his head before walking onto the bus, leaving Stein standing where she was, pouting. On the ride back, she had only had to threaten him once about hitting the holes in the road.

Stein huffed, pulled her duffel bag higher onto her shoulder, and followed him up. May had practically sprang from the SUV once he had parked, walking briskly up into the cargo bay and into the interior of the plane, likely looking for the wire and needle and antiseptic Stein had told her to get. She had looked at May's single wound in the car and, upon seeing that her wound was far from shallow, had ordered her to get said supplies.

She dropped her duffel bag back into it's place behind the couch as she had done earlier and, noticing that the three members of Coulson's team she had left on the bus were standing in the glass walled room, treaded lightly over to join them.

"Find anything?" she asked, poking her head into the room. Skye and FitzSimmons jumped, like they hadn't been aware that she and the other two had returned from their outing.

"Uh, not yet," Skye answered after a moment, hitting something on the screen of her tablet. Out of the corner of her eye, Stein saw something minimize itself to the background on the large screen on the wall. Her eye twitched, but she opted not to say anything, especially since the three of them looked frightened.

"All right, then," she stated after a moment, glancing between the three of them and the screen. They were staring at her in a rather undiscerning manner.

"What?" Stein asked, frowning.

"You, uh, have blood," Fitz said.

"On your face," Simmons clarified, pointing to the side of her face that Stein had slid across the ground on.

"And you ripped your jeans," Skye put in. Stein looked down, unsurprised to see the large hole in the denim that stretched from her upper thigh to just below her knee. There was blood on the material and the skin she could see, but no injury. "What happened to you guys?"

"Minor explosion," she explained shortly. "It came with minor injuries."

And then she slipped out of the room like a wraith, off to figure out where May had gotten to. She hadn't quite familiarized herself with the plane yet, hadn't ventured out beyond the cargo bay and the main area. She had no real idea where to begin, so she simply let her feet lead the way.

Pulling her phone out of her bra, she unlocked it to check for any messages. Seeing as there were none, she proceeded to lock it again.

She had not been properly prepared for what she saw when she looked up.

Ward and May were close together, a seeming tangle of limbs. Her back was up against the wall, and they were . . .

"Oh, God!" she screeched, scrambling backward. Her phone fell to the ground as her hands flew up to cover her eyes. She could feel her ears burning as her back hit a wall, eyes scrunched shut beneath her hands. "Did not just see that, nope, nope, nope, nope."

Years ago, long before she had temporarily retired from S.H.I.E.L.D, Melinda May had been her supervising officer, and Melinda May had _not_ been happy when she had found out about Stein and her now deceased husband. That had been one massive shit storm, to be certain. Because even though Melinda May was in favor of breaking the rules every once in a while, having outside of work relationships was one a personal rule that she expected all of the agents under her to uphold.

And Stein? Stein hadn't done that.

Stein had strayed so, so far from doing that.

A few things were making sense now, though—like why May was almost cordial with her, something she hadn't been for a long, long time.

She just couldn't really _believe_ it.

"I just, gah, if you're going to do something like _that,_ find a room and lock the fuckin' door!" she sputtered, rubbing her eyes with the heels of her hands until she saw bright star bursts, multicolored pinpricks beneath the dark her eyelids. "Did not want to see that; did not _need_ to see that!"

"Whoa, what's hap—Ack!"

Her shouts had drawn the attention of Skye and FitzSimmons, who must have come rushing from the other end of the plane. Had she really been that loud? She hadn't meant to be that loud.

Pulling her hands away from her face, Stein blinked a few times, clearing up her vision. Ward looked embarrassed, and May simply looked pissed off, glaring at some place just over her shoulder. Neither of them must have expected her to come looking for them, but she was a doctor; it was her duty to see to the injured before she did much else.

In fact, she had only stopped to talk to Skye and FitzSimmons in the first place because she was sure May would have been right back, and they really, really needed to find Coulson.

Even more so now that Stein had accidentally blown what appeared to have been a secret affair of some sort.

* * *

The Clairvoyant frowned deeply, scratching the back of his head.

"Rewind it," he ordered brusquely, leaning forward, one hand braced on the back of the office chair his lackey was perched in, the other braced against the desk as he tried to get a better view of the screen.

The man in the chair flinched at the sudden closeness, but did as he was bid, rewinding the footage to the very beginning that the women had appeared. And then, he hit the play button, sitting awkwardly still in his chair as his boss re watched what was playing out on the screen.

The Clairvoyant watched quietly as only one of the women came into focus, wavy ginger colored locks piled on her head in a messy bun, bits and pieces of it tumbling about her face and curling around her thin, elegant neck. Her skin, of course, was the same alabaster he recalled in his dreams, the color never changing unless she was exhausted from some kind of physical activity.

Even in the dark of the video footage, he could make out the glint of her whiskey colored eyes when she moved her head, bits of light catching them. He noted the way that her fingers curled around the shotgun in her hands—one whose barrel he was familiar with, as it had been in his face more times than one—almost like she was caressing the weapon lovingly.

The movement was normal for her, second nature in situations where Doctor Chess Stein was trying to be nonchalant about the fact that she held a shotgun in her hands and was not afraid to use it.

He noticed that, throughout her conversation with the homeless man, she was much, much nicer than she used to be—more understanding, more raw, more easygoing. When he had known her, she had been cool. Calculating.

When he had known her, she would use force without warning someone that she was going to do so to get her answers.

Something had sparked a change in her, and he knew exactly what it had been. He hadn't been there for the fallout of what he had done, of the news that had been delivered. He had expected it to take a different turn, though.

He had expected it to tear her apart, to rip her to shreds and shatter her being, to make it so she could never really pick up the pieces and carry on with her life.

He hadn't seen this outcome, though—hadn't predicted that she would find all of the pieces of herself and superglue them back together, making her spine out of steel and her nerve endings out of candy coated cable wire.

"I, uh, ran her face—Doctor Francesca Stein. She's on S.H.I.E.L.D's Index of Super Humans. She's currently listed as an inactive field agent, though. And the other one is one of-"

"Shut up," the Clairvoyant barked, watching closely as Chess Stein stood up, tossed a couple of bills in the direction of the view he was watching the video from, and backed out of the building slowly.

After a number of seconds, the man whose eyes they were watching from died.

Then, the building exploded, and the recorded footage fuzzed out and died.

He righted himself, sticking his hands into his pockets. "Did they make it out alive?"

"Uh, just a second." There was a bit of clicking, some typing, and then another stream of video footage showed up on the computer screen.

The Clairvoyant finally recognized the other woman who had been with Chess in the warehouse, even if the video didn't show her face—Melinda May. He wasn't aware she and Chess got along again; that was trouble just waiting to happen.

He watched as Stein was knocked down by the blast, skidding a good dozen feet on her face, shotgun flying out of her hands and sliding across the pavement, sparks flying up from the friction of where the metal met the ground.

She was only down a handful of seconds before she was up and running toward the SUV with May, glancing over her shoulder.

"Pause it," he barked, and the lackey jumped to do so, pausing the video where it was. The image was grainy, the coloring poor, but he could see clearly that she was missing half of her face—he could pick out pieces where the bone was showing through. Her hair looked akin to fire in the light of the blaze that burned just a few feet off camera, windswept, chunks of it falling about her face and down her back.

She was wearing a sweater that was much too big for her, and pants that didn't fit her well at all. Perhaps he had succeeded in breaking her in some way, because that was not the way the Francesca Stein he knew dressed herself—no sky high heels, no skimpy dresses, no smirk on a heavily made up face that said she knew something you didn't.

He _had_ broken Francesca Stein, just not in the right way.

And that was going to change.

**.**

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**notes2: **if you want to find me anywhere else, there are links in my profile. Not that I suggest doing so, but you know.

**notes3: **I don't ship May/Ward, or MayWard, or Mard, or whatever it is—if you couldn't tell.


	8. Chapter 8

**disclaimer: **disclaimed.

**notes: **I write myself into corners I can't seem to get out of.

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**.**

An awkward silence filled the room.

Stein was standing in front of May, pulling on a pair of latex gloves before she could stitch up the other woman's forehead. Stein herself didn't scar, but she knew from her schooling and past experiences that it was best to stitch up facial wounds to prevent scarring.

May wouldn't look at her. Her gaze was deadpan, eyes set straight ahead on the wall in front of her, jaw set at a firm angle. Stein was fairly certain that if May were to put anymore force into the way her jaw was set, she would break it easily.

After what Stein had started to refer to as the "Hallway Incident," she had dragged May into Coulson's office, locking the door firmly behind them. She knew that her former S.O didn't react kindly to awkward situations, and that had definitely been one; instead of saying anything, though, she had simply grabbed the other woman by the arm and had dragged her bodily to their current location.

Most things made sense now, though—why May had been talking to her, why May willingly had her back. Stein had figured she had grown past looking down on interoffice relationships. She just hadn't assumed that she would be _having_ one.

Instead of attempting to breach the subject like a handful of other girls she knew would do, Stein simply set to work, unscrewing the lid on the bottle of hydrogen peroxide and picking up a cotton ball, effectively dousing one with the other.

Without much of a warning, Stein grabbed May's chin and pressed the soaked cotton ball to her wound, holding back a pleased grin as the other woman flinched. She had known May for a while, and was well aware of the other woman's aversion to doctor's, especially when it concerned her own injuries.

Then, gently, Stein cleaned the area around the wound and the wound itself, dousing another couple of cotton balls and repeating her actions in silence. May still refused to look at her, and Stein could think of a few reasons why, first and foremost being the Hallway Incident.

Of course, the other three were probably trying to grill Ward about it—not that she blamed them. If she was on a plane with a set order of people all of the time and wasn't aware something was going on, she would want to find out about it.

Once done with that, she quickly checked for any kind of material still left in May's injury. Seeing none, she picked up a dry cotton ball, drying the wound gently. She didn't want to agitate it any more than she had to, lest she begin the bleeding anew and at an even more furious rate than it had been before.

Stein turned, placing the cotton ball in a pile with the others before she picked up her sterilized curved needle and the thread she had had soaking in the hydrogen peroxide, intent on threading her needle and setting to closing up May's wound.

"It was an indiscretion," May announced. Stein almost dropped her needle, but kept it cool and centered most of her focus on the eye of the needle—the stupid thread wouldn't go into it!

"You don't have to explain yourself," she said, wanting to break out into a victory dance when the thread finally went through. "I totally get it, May. You _know_ that."

Stein turned back to May, unsurprised to see that she was still staring at the wall. Then, gently, she started sewing up her wound, knowing the flesh around the cut was numb. It wouldn't be for very long, but she'd be done by then.

"However," she continued on, puncturing the other woman's skin with her needle and pulling the thread through. "If you want to talk it out, I'm here. You have my ears, but not my right eyebrow."

She saw May crack a small smile at Stein's joke—she had lost the entirety of her eyebrow after her skid on the pavement. Her hair didn't grow back like her skin and her limbs did, which was a rather unfortunate downside, especially when she had to cover up bald spots or was missing an eyebrow.

It would take at least a month for her to grow her eyebrow back.

"I am also," she continued, tugging a bit on the needle and thread, "incredibly sorry for accidentally calling attention to something that was a secret."

May shrugged and Stein smacked her on the shoulder, admonishing her with a, "Quit it, you're messing up the stitches."

"It wasn't going to last."

Stein's fingers hesitated a moment before she went on with stitching quickly, nearly done.

"As I stated, it was an indiscretion originally fueled by rage and alcohol-"

"Ooh, not the best way to start things." Stein finished off the stitches, tying up the end before snipping it all off and setting the needle next to the cotton balls, reaching for the band aids May had had the foresight to grab.

"-but the sex was great."

Stein choked on her spit as she put the band aids over May's stitches, backing away as the action turned into a poorly executed cough into her elbow to at least help her save a little face in the situation.

"Too much information," she sputtered out, grabbing the plastic bag they had brought in with them. She started picking up the garbage from the quick patch job, shoving the cotton balls and trash from the band aids into the bag before swiping her latex gloves off of her hands and tossing them in the bag as well.

Out of the corner of her eye, Stein caught sight of the half empty water bottle that had been left on Coulson's desk at an earlier date.

_Dehydration._

And then it clicked.

* * *

Skye and FitzSimmons were staring at Ward warily, left in the hallway by Stein dragging May behind her at a furious pace. Of course, they had already started following Stein when she had went to go and look for May in the first place, completely confused by the words "minor explosion."

When it came to S.H.I.E.L.D, there was no such thing as a "minor explosion," especially considering all of the blood that was on Stein's face and leg with no injuries to be seen.

Skye put it up to the "accelerated healing" bit that had been in her personnel file.

"So," she said mischievously, breaking the pregnant silence that had filled the hall after Stein's and May's joint departure. "You and Agent May, huh?"

Ward simply glared and stalked past her, down the hall from whence they had come. She shrugged, used to it, before looking to FitzSimmons, who appeared just as shocked as Ward and May had been a few minutes prior.

"Are you guys shackin' up together too, or?" she asked after a moment, raising an eyebrow. The pair turned a rather alarming shade of pink.

"No, no, _no_," Simmons sputtered, fingers coming up and pulling on the collar of her blouse.

"Of course not!" Fitz protested at the same time, shaking his head.

Skye glanced from one to the other and then, after a heartbeat, she shrugged. "Whatever." Then, she made her way back to the main area of the plane, tablet still running the facial recognition program. Doctor or Agent or whatever she was Stein's personnel file was still running on her tablet, all of it unattainable from her level one clearance access.

If she didn't have her internet nanny around her wrist, she would have known much, much more about the woman who had breezed onto the bus with the intent of finding Coulson, level one clearance or no.

By the time Skye had made it back to the main area of commerce on the bus, seated herself, and made herself comfortable, FitzSimmons had joined her.

They sat in a comfortable silence for a few minutes before Stein came rushing out of Coulson's office, eyes wild, phone in her hand.

"Dehydration!" she exclaimed excitedly, waving her phone in the air. "Centipedes are prone to dehydration!"

* * *

Stein could feel the weird looks she was getting, but she didn't rightly care. She burst into the midst of the three S.H.I.E.L.D agents who had stayed on the bus during her last outing, grin on her face and manic look on her eyes.

"Nope," Skye announced after a moment of silence. "I have no idea what you're talking about."

With a heavy sigh and a half hearted clawing at her own face, Stein's shoulders fell as she rolled her eyes and looked toward the ceiling.

"Centipedes are prone to dehydration," she repeated. "Which means that wherever _Centipede_ is, they must be close to water." There was a second option, of course, which would explain how Centipede would know about what had happened to Coulson in New York—if they even knew to begin with, that was.

Centipede could always be connected to the Rising Tide, but Stein wasn't sure. It could have been what Jeremy had meant, but she wouldn't know until she knew if Centipede knew highly classified information or not. Even then, there could have always been a mole within the organization, which was highly probable.

"Of course," she continued on into the silence, "it's only a slightly educated guess, but it's worth a shot, right?"

**.**

* * *

**notes2: **y'all are lovely creatures; review?


	9. Chapter 9

**disclaimer: **disclaimed.

* * *

**.**

The Clairvoyant held the picture loosely in his hand, the edges of it well worn and faded. There were deep lines going through it from where it had been folded and unfolded and folded up again through the years.

Francesca Stein was laughing in the picture, head thrown back, mouth open, neck exposed. A massive, floppy hat sat on top of her head, capping off locks that had been dyed blue-green on a whim. In front of her sat a chess board, half of the white pieces removed from the board already, black pieces dominating.

She had called a checkmate seconds before he had snapped the picture, laughing at whatever he had said in reply—more than likely, it was something along the lines of "fuck you." They had always been like that, insulting each other in good humor while doing everything—playing chess, on a mission, on their wedding day.

He folded the picture in his hand back up, stuffing it into it's permanent residence in his breast pocket.

"Send the image to Reina; tell her that if the ginger woman is encountered, she is to be shot in the head and brought back here." The image in question was one from the warehouse, Stein's head titled to the side, cat-like smile half spread on her face.

"I think we may have found the answer to one of our problems."

* * *

The Clairvoyant unlocked the door to the room easily, stuffing the key back in his pocket and nodding to the guards as he opened the door and flounced inside, expensive shoes tapping against the tile. The doors were shut behind him in a quick manner, clicking as they were locked from the outside.

The room was large, with giant bay windows overlooking a cliff and the sea—there was no land in between, and the windows were locked up tight and bullet proof. There were a handful of potted plants lined up against the pale walls, a maroon colored couch in the center of the room, a bookcase with a hodgepodge of books pushed up against one wall, and a table with two chairs and a chess set on the other.

Agent Phillip Coulson sat in one of the chairs, though he had angled it toward the door.

"Agent Coulson," he greeted with a smirk. "How lovely to see you alive and well."

The Clairvoyant had to hand it to the elder agent—he kept his face a perfect mask, giving nothing away.

"I could say the same of you, Agent Connors. You died in a car bombing in Moscow."

"And you died in New York, so I could say we're even. They call me the Clairvoyant now, anyway—Agent Connor Connors is long dead and gone." He walked through the room, taking a seat in the empty chair across from Coulson.

"Now, if you will—what happened the day after you died?"

* * *

Fresh, untattered, but well worn pair of jeans in hand, Stein approached a door she had been told was Ward's cabin. It had been a general consensus, at least; since she didn't know the plane, she could only assume that he was in there, especially after the Hallway Incident.

Tentatively, she knocked then glanced over her shoulder. FitzSimmons had disappeared to their joint lab space, May had gone to prep the SUV and make sure everything they needed was inside and Skye had gone . . . somewhere. She wasn't exactly sure where.

"Agent Ward?" she called, knocking again. "We might have a lead, if you're done being embarrassed or pouting or whatever it is you're doing."

Stein waited a few moments, hearing _something _on the other side of the door, then raised her fist to knock again.

She had almost made a connection with the door when it opened to Ward's frowning face. Okay, so she had to look up to see his frowning, grumpy face, but the fact of the matter was that he had actually opened the door.

"We're leaving in five," she stated, then raised her jeans and waved them about a bit. "Where's the restroom?"

"Not going to change in the car again?"

"That was done out of necessity," she explained quickly—she could feel heat creeping up her neck, likely the same cherry color of her Christmas sweater. She hadn't really thought her actions through earlier, had forgotten that she had been in the passenger seat of an SUV. "I didn't want to get blood all over the interior. And this time, I have to get all of this-" she motioned to the blood, "-off of my face."

Ward stared her down for a moment; Stein did her best not to squirm. She wasn't overly fond of being assessed anymore, especially not by other agents. There had been a time where she could have stared him down without feeling the urge to run away, but that time was long gone.

"This way," he said, shifting to walk past her, closing the door to his cabin behind himself. She caught a glimpse of a perfectly made bed, and a massive stack of board games.

She turned and followed him at a small distance, jeans wrapped up in her fist. Honestly, she was quite surprised that he was showing her the way, let alone had actually opened the door to his cabin when she had knocked.

It was a quick distance, the trek made in silence. He opened the door for her—much to her surprise—and she quickly flounced into the relatively small restroom past him, closing the door behind herself and setting to work immediately, unstrapping the holster from her thigh and kicking off her ankle high boots.

Quickly removing her destroyed pair of jeans from her body, she pulled on the newer, tighter fitting, skinnier ones that she had tossed in her duffel bag, buttoning them and zipping them up before looking toward the sink and the mirror.

She had been prepared for what she would see in the mirror—her ginger hair was a mess about her head, almost none of it in the bun that she had had when she had first walked on the plane that morning. If it had been clean and brushed out, the mass of red-gold would have fallen to her elbows. As it was, it was a tangled mess that she had little hope for.

With a huff, she took out the hair tie that had been in her hair, gathering fistfuls of it and piling it all on top of her head, tying it together quickly without a care for what it looked like in the end.

With that done, she got a clearer look of herself in the mirror, unsurprised to see the crusty, flaky blood smeared all across her face. Even through the grime, she could make out the fact that she was missing an eyebrow. She turned on the hot water immediately, mixing a little bit of cold in with it, splashing it on her face.

By the time she was all done, she could feel a knot f0rming in her stomach at the prospect of what she was about to do. She worried about if they couldn't find Coulson in time, if all they found in one of those warehouses was a corpse of the S.H.I.E.L.D agent.

Fury would never, ever forgive her; she highly doubted _anyone_ on the plane she was currently inside of would ever forgive her, let alone themselves.

Scooping her trashed pants and her boots up in one hand, she picked up her thigh holster and gun before opening the door to the bathroom, completely intent on rushing to the SUV so she, May, and Ward could go, go, go.

She had not expected Ward to still be standing next to the bathroom door, waiting for her. She nearly dropped everything in her arms when she caught sight of him, swallowing a yelp as she entered the hall in her stockinged feet.

He wasn't looking at her, she noted, but at her feet.

"Why do your socks have reindeer on them?"

"Because I'm rather fond of the creatures," she quipped quickly, strutting down the hall toward her duffel bag while attempting to strap her holster back onto her thigh. "That, and they match my sweater." Not that she had actively been trying to match her sweater—it had just happened, because you never know what you're grabbing off of the floor and throwing into a bag at three a.m.

Making a small noise in victory as she successfully strapped her holster to her thigh with only one hand, she dumped her jeans into her duffel bag, picking it up and preparing to sling it across her body.

Ward grabbed it and took it from her instead, though. Stein frowned, tempted to take it back from him, but instead started walking toward the cargo bay, slipping a boot onto her foot as she walked. Was he being overly nice as some kind of interrogation technique as to how much May had told him about their, uh, _thing?_

Because, as she recalled from his file, he wasn't exactly a team player, go-getter, help old ladies across the street and take them to bingo kind of person (although, based on the amount of board games she had seen in his cabin, she didn't doubt that he would enjoy playing bingo if he were to go ever go).

"Thanks," she said over her shoulder, pulling the other boot onto her foot, "for taking my bag and stuff."

And then she fell down the stairs, because that was just the kind of person Karma was to her.

**.**

* * *

**notes: **you're all lovely, lovely creatures.

**notes2: **that box down there is lonely.


	10. Chapter 10

**disclaimer:** disclaimed.

**notes: **I believe we have reached the halfway point, if things work out the way they did in my head.

* * *

**.**

Stein put the SUV in park, turning the key in the ignition to the off position and unbuckling her seat belt. Both Ward and May had been silent the entire ride to the warehouse they were now parked in front of. Somehow, May had delegated herself to the back seat, Ward had wound up in the passenger seat, and Stein had wound up driving again.

"All right," she finally announced, turning in her seat so that she had both Ward and May in her line of sight, one leg tucked up underneath her. She fished her phone out of her bra, setting it down on the dashboard before continuing on. "Can both of you work in the field together at this moment in time? Because, goodness, I'm fairly certain I would have gotten frostbite from the ride over here if not for my _fabulous_ sweater."

She was pleased to see Ward's eye twitch at the mention of her sweater; subtly, she pressed the button on the underside of her sleeve that made it light up.

His eye twitched again.

"Before _either_ of you answer, I'm going to step out of the car, close the door, and walk away. You have five minutes to sort this out. I will be back by then, and both of you will either be getting along, or one of you is going to be the get away driver if we so need one. Capiche?"

She didn't wait for an answer, twisting in her seat, unlocking her door, and slipping out of the vehicle quickly, nearly tripping on the laces to her boots as her feet hit the ground. She had yet to tie them properly, even after falling down the stairs because of them.

Stein closed the door, then walked until she was a good deal away from the SUV before she kneeled down and gathered the shoelaces in her hands, intent on tying them. Over the years, she had become a decent mediator, though she had to admit that she likely shouldn't have spoken to Ward and May like they were children who couldn't get along. They weren't children, they were just adults who acted like sullen children whose hands had been caught in the cookie jar.

An uneasy feeling settled on her as she tied her shoes; she could feel someone watching her, gaze heavy on her prone form. Cautiously, she looked around as she finished tying her boots, mouth dry. Nothing moved, not even a twitch, and the area around her was silent, save for the roaring of traffic on the other side of the river and far away from the district she had driven them too.

Hesitantly, she stood, subtly reaching for the fully loaded glock on her left thigh.

It was just a precaution, of course, but she felt better with the weight of the gun in her hand. She would feel much, much better when she was under cover, with her shotgun in the crook of her shoulder and fingers around the barrel and the trigger and someone to back her up.

She hauled open the driver's side backdoor to the SUV, fully prepared to see something ridiculous that would make her want to wash her eyes out with bleach.

Instead, she saw a blase Melinda May sitting in the backseat, arms crossed around her middle in a semi-defensive manner, slight smirk on her face. Ward was still in the front seat, shoulder's set, face forward determinedly _not _looking in either female's direction.

"Have we worked out any problems?"

"Ward's going in; I'm keeping the car running." Stein could see from the body language of both agents that only _one_ of them had worked out their problems, and that had more than likely been May.

But that was just her luck, wasn't it? Being sent in blind with a potentially emotionally compromised man-child who had been injured only a number of hours before.

Stein had been injured, too, but she bounced back far, far quicker than anyone had any right to do.

"All right, then," she said, pulling her shotgun out of her duffel bag, then pulling out a handful of shells, stuffing them into her pockets. "We'll be back."

She closed the door on May and walked around the front of the dark SUV, stopping momentarily to wait for Ward, who got out of the vehicle in a rather sulky fashion.

"Push it aside," she stated simply once he had closed the door. "I need you to have a clear head when we go in there, okay?" The muscles in his jaw tightened, but he ultimately nodded.

Steeling herself, Stein angled her chin toward her head, put the safety back on her glock and placed it back into her thigh holster before adjusting her grip on her shotgun and heading toward the door of the warehouse. According to the information Skye had pulled up on the specific building, it would be the prime place to hold Coulson for an indefinite amount of time. There was an underground area to it, it was on the water, it was in a relatively unpopulated area.

She still felt like she was being watched, but it could have very well been May watching their progress toward the building. Stein had a feeling that her's and Ward's entrance to the warehouse would be a lot less of a surprise and more of an ambush.

She kept going anyway, fairly certain that she was only jumpy because the last warehouse she had walked into had exploded. Besides, if Ward felt like there was something that was going to go wrong, she was pretty sure he would speak up and say something.

The nagging feeling kept gnawing away at her insides when they were well inside of the warehouse.

The space was empty—there was _nothing _there. No containers, no machines, not even some kind of garbage. It was spacious, cold, and completely, inexplicably empty, but also clean. Had they gotten the wrong address? Gone in the wrong direction?

"This doesn't feel right," she said quietly to Ward, who was just inches away from her. He seemed on edge, but so would she if she had been alone with May in a car for a few minutes. "It's too empty. Too not lived in."

Her eyes were darting back and forth, probing the shadows for something, anything that would prove the feeling in her gut wrong.

Then, she saw a man with a gun standing in the corner on the second level of the warehouse.

She saw him too late, though, bullet ripping through the flesh of her forehead before she had a chance to shout a warning.

* * *

Melinda May was getting antsy. It had been a good fifteen minutes since Ward and Stein had gone into the warehouse. She still felt like she should have gone in instead, or like all three of them should have gone in together.

She had the SUV running, engine a dull rumble inside of the tempered plexiglass and steel of the vehicle. Otherwise, she had heard nothing at all—no noises coming from inside, no commotion that drew her already focused attention.

Twenty minutes after they went in, she flicked the safety off of her gun, got out of the SUV and cautiously entered the warehouse, driver side door to the SUV cracked open and the engine still running.

It was empty, spacious, cold—there was nothing there, nothing that shouted Centipede, nothing that told her where Ward and Stein had wandered off to. There were no shouts, no grunts of pain, no gunfire, no noises. It was almost like there was no one in the warehouse _anywhere_.

And then she saw Stein's shotgun lying on the ground in a puddle of blood. There were signs of a scuffle around it, smear marks in the blood, half remembered shoe prints stuck into the cement.

Quickly and efficiently, she looked over the rest of the warehouse.

There was no one there.

**.**

* * *

**notes2: **you are all fantastic creatures.


	11. Chapter 11

**disclaimer: **disclaimed.

**Notes: **not updating tomorrow, seeing as it's Christmas. Merry Christmas, if you celebrate it, or whatever. Have a nice day if you don't!

* * *

**.**

Stein woke slowly, head pounding. Her limbs felt like dead weight; she couldn't move them, no matter how hard she thought about it.

She wasn't overly fond of being shot in the head—it brought back terrible memories, and it was easily the only injury that would put her down for a good while. Admittedly, the time had lessened since the first incident that involved a bullet going through her cranium, going from a week and a half to a little less than a day. In other circumstances, it would have been fine.

In other circumstances, she would have had more than just one person with her, and they would have had more information than what they had been going on.

Which was exactly why she panicked when she came to full consciousness, listless eyes taking in her surroundings—a white wall, a couple of potted plants, a coffee table with a pitcher of water and two glasses on it. In her chest, her lungs felt like balloons poked full of holes as she tried to take in a breath.

Nothing was familiar, and there was nothing in her immediate line of vision that would give anything away as to what her location was and why she was there.

Her body shut down on her again, plunging her world into darkness.

* * *

She sat back up with a gasp, heaving in a great big gulp of air. A multitude of vertebrae in her back popped with the movement, firecrackers in her ears. It felt lovely to be able to breathe again, to see things clearly. Her limbs still felt heavy, but she could move them this time, experimentally flexing her fingers against the material of the couch cushion.

Her body was sore, and her head was still pounding. Her eyes were sensitive to the light coming from the ceiling. They adjusted and hurt her a little less once she squinted at her surroundings, slowly turning her head—which titled at a rather awkward angle.

_Guess my motor skills aren't completely up to standard_, she thought.

Now, though, she could make out the potted plants.

"That is a _nice_ ficus," she announced, tongue heavy in her mouth to the point that she half-slurred her words.

"We're in a potentially dangerous situation, and the only thing you can comment on is a ficus?"

Stein didn't have the nerves or the energy to jump. Instead, she turned her limp head slowly, although she was still unable to see Ward. He was somewhere out of her minimal line of sight, behind her in the room. He sounded like he was mostly in one piece, but she couldn't be sure.

"I'm not May," she grumbled, lying back down. She was light headed yet, and she knew she shouldn't have sat up when she did, especially that fast. "It's not like I can take everything in a serious way. And I really like that ficus."

The good news was that, apparently, Ward could understand her in her delirious, hazy state (because, honestly, she couldn't really understand herself).

The bad news was that he had been abducted with her, and she had no clue as to what had happened to May. She also had no idea as to where their current location was, why they had taken the duo, and where in the hell Coulson was.

With a sigh, she asked, "What's our situation look like?"

He was a competent agent, she knew—it had been in his file, written in his record, and May didn't sleep with just _anyone_, pretty face or not. He would have already assessed the room, their situation, and any possible way they could escape.

"Three bullet resistant bay windows, a locked set of double doors, eight ficus, and a bookcase filled with books from the dark romanticism literary movement and six copies of Mary Shelley's _Frankenstein,_ all in different languages." After a pause, he continued, "There's also a chess set, another table, and two chairs."

_Plus the couch and the coffee table_, she tacked on silently. She was tired yet, feeling like she could sleep for twenty more hours at least. It seemed like their captors wanted them to be in the most amount of comfort possible, which was a little odd. When Stein thought of top secret organizations taking captives, she didn't associate comfort with the situation.

"Any apparent way out?" she mumbled.

"No," he answered after a moment.

"Not with that attitude there isn't," she sniped without conviction, bringing up her left hand and pushing it into her hair line, pulling her locks out of her face. "Are you injured?"

There was a slight moment of hesitation.

"No."

Stein knew better; his momentary hesitation told her all she needed to know. He had been injured in some way, at some point, but it must have been in a spot where he could hide it. There were many, many agents who did the same thing, too proud to admit that they had been bested.

"Is that the only word in your vocabulary?" She cracked her eyes open, looking up a the bright white ceiling, saddened by the fact that her headache still intensified. Stein snapped them shut tightly again, dropping her hand from her hair to her eyes.

He didn't provide her with an answer; she had had an inkling of an idea that he wouldn't. It would have been too much like walking into a trap, words repeated too many times to be surprising, no matter who one spoke to.

Stein took a deep breath and rolled her shoulders into the couch cushion in a poor attempt to judge how much motion she had—since she didn't manage much more than a shrug, she knew it wasn't much. It would be another three hours, if the data from previous tests was to be trusted, before she would get a full range of motion in her upper body, let alone be able to walk around without tripping over her own feet.

"What have you seen of our captors?" she finally asked.

"Nothing."

* * *

May parked the SUV haphazardly next to the ramp of the cargo bay, leaving the door wide open when she got out. There were more S.H.I.E.L.D assigned cars present than there had been earlier; she had called Fury once she had realized that Ward and Stein were not, in fact, still in the warehouse.

There was no evidence that they had ever been in the warehouse, other than the puddle of blood and Stein's shotgun. Upon further inspection, she was sure that S.H.I.E.L.D would conclude that there hadn't been anyone inside other than those two—it had seemed pretty clean during her quick once over before she had contacted HQ.

Skye and FitzSimmons were standing just in front of Lola, tablet in Skye's hands. The device was like an extension of her; it was rare to see the young woman without it, especially if there was something going on.

"Why is Fury here? Where're Ward and Frankenstein?" Skye asked when she saw only one agent strut up the ramp. May leveled a hard gaze at her as she pushed past them, angling for the stairs. How could she have let that happen? The COMS should have been online, she should have gone in with them.

"Personal issues" shouldn't have gotten in the way.

May found Fury and his retinue of pencil pushing, gun toting S.H.I.E.L.D agent's in the main area of the bus, moods somber, many of them milling around.

"That's three agents in less than twenty four hours, Agent May. Going for a record?"

Someone's phone rang, reminding May that she had Stein's phone in her pocket, the knowledge of it heavy as a stone.

"No, sir," she answered obligingly.

If Stein hadn't insisted on leaving her phone in the car, had she not been quite as textbook as she had about the entire ordeal, they could have tracked the GPS on her phone to find her. But no—she had had to play by the rules, even if was just loosely. She _had_ to leave her phone in the car where the enemy couldn't get to it.

But what could possibly be so incriminating on her phone?

**.**

* * *

**notes2: **review? Maybe? I'm a feedback junkie.


	12. Chapter 12

**disclaimer: **disclaimed.

**notes:** I hope y'all had a Merry Christmas, or a nice day, or whatever! Here's the next one.

* * *

**.**

Stein had to stand on the balls of her feet to see the bottom of the very top case of the bookshelf, only just barely capable of making out the authors of the spines of the well-worn books. Poe, Melville, Shelley, Hawthorne—names she was familiar with, names she had known well before she could read. Their words had been her bedtimes stories, read to her by her soft-voiced, strong willed mother.

Once she had gotten a decent control of her appendages and her eyes stopped being quite so light sensitive, she had crawled off of the couch and done her own investigating, only to come to the same conclusion as Ward had:

There was no apparent way out, not yet.

She had, however, found the panel for the light system and had dimmed the lights a good amount. It was dark outside now, the sky covered in clouds. If she had her days straight in her head, it was a new moon; it would have been dark outside anyway, clouds or no.

Hours ago, someone had brought the two of them a light dinner. He hadn't deigned to speak to them—he simply set the tray down and left. Said tray was still sitting on the coffee table, though it now lacked most of the salad, the pomegranate, and the roast beef sandwich.

Somehow, they had known she was a vegetarian—something that wasn't in her file, and wasn't a widely known fact outside of her family. It was either that, or they wanted to see if she and Ward would fight each other to the death over the sandwich. The only problem with that theory was that, from what she could see, there weren't any cameras or listening devices—she had even checked all of the ficus! There had been nothing, not that she could see.

Which was how she wound up craning her neck to look at the books on the very top shelf of the polished oak bookcase, eyes devouring the titles engraved in fading gold filigree, attempting to discern which of them looked a little bit too big, which of them bulged at the seams, which of them could possibly be hiding listening bugs or have a microscopic camera embedded in them.

The lower shelves had been easier since she could reach them. She had taken the books off the shelves, one by one, flipping through them at a lightening pace before placing them lovingly back on the shelf, decidedly bug free. The higher up the shelves she got, the older the tomes were—they appeared to be organized by publication date first, then the last letter of the authors last name.

She had only seen one other person organize their books the same way, and he was long dead. She hadn't been there to bring him back like she had brought Coulson back—not that there had been much left, since the car bomb had acted like a high powered oven.

Stein didn't think much of it, though—plenty of people were quirky with their books, organizing them this way and that. There would always be people who organized out of the norm, and it was completely possible that you meet at least one of them in a lifetime.

Possible, but improbable.

With a huff, Stein dropped back down to the bottoms of her feet, deciding that being a female of slightly below average height had many disadvantages when it came to tall bookcases, especially when she was in a time of need. When she wasn't craning her neck or standing on her toes, her head only came even with the very bottom of the top shelf of the bookcase.

The spot where the bullet had ripped through her fleshy forehead before it went through her skull and the gooey, gray matter that was her brain was still tender, the flesh puckered, the area around it red and purple and puckered. A small chunk of her hair was missing from the back of her head, where the bullet had exited her body. The flesh there was much the same as it was at the entry point.

Her face and neck were covered in dry, flaky blood that cracked like Velcro whenever her facial expression changed or she turned her head. She couldn't see where all it was, but she knew it was all over, streaks and droplets staining the front and collar of her sweater. She knew she looked like something out of a Christmas movie gone horribly, horribly wrong.

Honestly, she could probably give grown men nightmares with the way she looked at that minute, as well as ruin Christmas forever for small children.

Popping her knuckles, she walked quietly across the room and picked up one of the two high backed chairs from the table, hefting it in her arms and carrying it back to the bookcase. If she wanted to figure out whether or not they were being watched, she was going to need to be a little taller than she was on her tip-toes.

Setting the chair down quietly, she stepped up onto the seat, hands on the back of the chair to steady herself before standing. Now, she was eye level with the books, able to read them clearly and see all of them.

Their spines were worn and fading, some of them cracked from being opened so many times and read through. On some of them, the edges were frayed from age and use.

"Little odd to put the most read on the top shelf," Stein mumbled, plucking the first book from it's place on the polished shelf and flipping through it quickly. Smudges caught her eye as she went from page to page, small notes and quips made in the margins every so often, a man's handwriting.

Frowning at the handwriting, she snapped the book shut and placed it back on the shelf and grabbed the next one. Indeed, there was writing in the margins of this one, too, in the same careful scribble as the last. The scrawl looked familiar to her, though she couldn't quite place where she had seen it—it was small, cramped in the space allowed.

There was writing in the one after that, too, though Stein didn't pause in her venture to read any bit of it. She picked up words from the print itself here and there, though none of them really registered. She was busy looking for the bugs, wondering why her captors had taken both her and Ward hostage, and wishing she could get the blood off of her face, and her neck, and her hands.

And then she froze, hand hovering over the book she was holding.

"How did they _know_?" she asked out loud, eyes unfocused.

"What?"

Her shoulder's stiffened—she hadn't been aware Ward had woken up. He had been asleep on the couch she had vacated, based on her orders. That had been hours ago, and she really shouldn't have been surprised that he had chosen to wake up.

"They knew to shoot me in the head," she stated simply, mind rushing. She had been thinking about if, kind of. The warehouse had been too perfectly executed to not be a setup, and she had been shot in the head while Ward had only been bludgeoned from behind.

Stein snapped the book shut with one hand. "They knew what would happen if I was shot in the head—it's the easiest way to incapacitate me, and it is _not_ common knowledge. It's redacted from my file completely, and it's most definitely not available through the Index."

Elsewhere, Stein heard the locks in the door tumble. She was too focused forward, though, to take much notice of it.

She stuffed the book back onto the shelf and half turned on the chair to face Ward, unable to make out any of his defining features because of the dim light overhead. "How did they _know_?" she repeated.

"Likely because I told them, sweet heart." The door shut and the lights came on full blast, forcing Stein to close her eyes for a moment, blinded. "You wouldn't have come willingly, and head wounds put you down for a good few hours. An obvious solution."

When she opened them again, she angled her head toward the speaker to get a decent look at him. He was male, given his voice that struck something in the back of her memory. Her memory, of course, was still repairing itself, brain trying to sort things out from a jumble into something she could understand.

"Of course, you were supposed to be alone. I didn't think you would ever actually adopt the buddy system." His voice clicked before she even saw his angular face and white-blond hair.

Her heart leaped into her throat before she fell off of the chair in shock.

**.**

* * *

**notes2: **some of the guys at my dad's work dote on me, and it's hysterical because YES I WOULD LOVE A SODA TO GO WITH MY OTHER TWELVE THE OTHERS HAVE BOUGHT ME.


	13. Chapter 13

**disclaimer: **disclaimed.

**notes: **I had some huge problems with crafting the dialogue and whatnot with this one.

* * *

**.**

Stein picked herself up off of the floor slowly and precisely, hands shaking, eyes fixated on the blond man who was still standing near the door, bemused expression on his face.

"I see you've lost your edge," he noted dryly, leaning languidly against one of the double doors. "Shame, really. You used to be able to take surprises in an easy stride."

"Connor?" she croaked uneasily once she was on her feet. Her lungs didn't want to inflate like they should have, hesitant breaths she was allowing rattling in her ribcage.

"No, it's Oprah Winfrey," he sniped sarcastically. "There's a brand new car under your chair!" He rolled his eyes and shrugged his shoulders, pulling a phone out of his pocket. "Of course I'm Connor, you dumb shit."

She swallowed hard, lump in her throat. She had no words—there was nothing she could say that wasn't already obvious. The _you're dead_'s and the _how are you alive'_s wouldn't find her way past the rock-like lump.

"What? Speechless?"

Stein lowered herself into the still upright chair, body shaking, appendages folding gracelessly and jerkily, arms tightened around her middle, fingers digging into her ribs. She didn't feel empty, she didn't feel numb; she didn't feel happy, or sad.

"I know you're not mute," Connor continued on, tapping on the screen of his phone, majority of his attention focused on the object. "I heard you say my name like it was the best word in the world. Is it shock that's making you sit there like a kicked puppy?"

She was filled with _rage_.

It was bubbling inside of her, boiling beneath her skin, too close to the surface for comfort.

But she knew she couldn't afford to explode so she sat quietly, eyes unfocused, fingers digging into her flesh through her sweater like knives. Connor could keep coming at her with his words, he could keep taunting her with the fact that he was alive, but she wouldn't snap.

She didn't know what would happen if she snapped, and she didn't want to find out.

"It must be the shock," he concluded, locking his cellular device and slipping it into the pocket of his black slacks. "You can talk your way through everything else."

Connor's expensive shoes whispered across the marble floor of the room as he strode toward her, one hand in his pocket. His tanned face held a passive expression, but something darker and dangerous was lurking beneath his handsome features, as if it were waiting to come out of hiding at the slightest hint of jeopardy.

Stein bit down on the insides of her cheeks, hard enough to draw blood.

"What happened to you?" he asked playfully, attempting to bait her. She raised her eyes to his slowly as he stopped walking, just a few feet short of her. "Did something break you down, ruin you, rip you apart from the inside?"

Stein couldn't help herself; she opened her mouth, and started talking.

"I wrapped my car around a tree," she stated, voice wavering as she rose out of the chair. "One hundred and eight bones crushed to faerie dust, trachea shattered like fine china, lungs popped like bubble gum bubbles blown too large. My intestines fell out of my gut like I was a pinata and the kids were too happy even after the candy fell out." Her voice was rising as she spoke each word with a ferocity that slowly betrayed her fury. "And the worst part? The worst part was that I _couldn't die. _I couldn't die, Connor, not when I wanted to the most. My heart would keep restarting, bones pulling themselves together, skin healing itself like it was normal for shards of bone to push through it, poking, poking, _poking_, sticking out of my flesh like angry teeth."

Stein took a hasty step forward, shoulder's thrown back, teeth bared, blood covered face set in a sneer. Her whiskey eyes were wild, harsh lighting of the room glinting off of them, making her pupils seem much, much smaller. She could see the confusion in Connor's eyes, the emotion fueling her into a frenzy.

"It was three days before anyone found me, because I couldn't find it in me to drag myself out of that gully. I had no fight left, no reason to pick myself up and haul myself out of the twisted hunk of metal. And then, you piece of shit? Then it took me a year to find the pieces, a _year _before Linda and Rob felt safe leaving me home alone for more than a few hours, before they started leaving the knives in the kitchen and the guns back in their usual spots, before they started leaving the bleach in the laundry room and the rat poison in a decent place.

"They were never quite sure what they would come home to—blood spray in the kitchen, in the den, up the stairs. An empty bottle of bleach sitting on the counter, maybe my body on the floor with an ax in my head. But you didn't have that fear, did'ya Connor? You never had to go through _wondering_ what you would see when you walked through the door, whether or not your wife had stuck her head into the oven or the microwave and started the fucking thing up, _waiting_ for her heart to stop and restart and stop again and again and again, _hoping_ it doesn't start itself back up again, that her brain doesn't decide to pull itself back together and keep working."

Her chest is heaving, lungs fighting to catch up with the air she expended during her tirade, hands balled into fists at her side.

Connor, however, gives her none of the satisfaction she had been looking for. He smirks instead, face only inches from hers, and whistles lowly. "There's the woman I remember," he said, lips curling up into a half smile, bits of his fine blond hair falling into his eyes. "The one who wore her blood like war paint, with skin tight clothes like battle armor."

Stein couldn't stop herself and before she really recognized what she was doing, she already had her arm drawn back and her left hand curled into a fist.

The bones in her knuckles cut into the flesh of his jaw as she decked him squarely, as hard as she could muster. The blow sent him reeling away from her, hand on his face like he couldn't quite figure out what had just happened. She could feel the bones in her hand splinter, broken, already starting to pull themselves back together milliseconds later.

Connor looked at her, harsh expression set on his face, opening and closing his mouth, gaping like a fish. A large portion of Stein was giddy and very pleased with the fact that Connor Connors—who often claimed he knew every outcome of everything, the ignorant prick—_had not_ seen her punch coming.

He righted himself, glaring at her, and snapped his jaw shut so loud she heard his teeth clank together. "You might not want to do that when I come back," he stated acidly before stalking out of the room, unlocking the door hastily with a key he had stuffed in his breast pocket and making a quick retreat, slamming the door behind him.

All of the rage that had fueled her moments before seemed to dissipate with Connor's departure, leaving her limbs feeling rather like jelly, heavy with the fact that her dead husband was, in fact, still alive. And what had she done? She had punched him.

But he had deserved it.

With a heavy sigh, Stein sank to the floor, cradling her left hand to her chest, bones still knitting themselves back together. She hung her head for a few moments before looking up and around the room.

She nearly screeched in shock when she saw Ward still sitting on the couch, mildly perturbed look on his face as he stared at her. She had forgotten he had even been in the room with Connor and herself, vaguely surprised that he hadn't _said_ anything during her confrontation with Connor.

"Oh," she said simply. "You're still here?"

**.**

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**notes2: **OH GOD. THIS TOOK FOREVER.

**notes3: **you guys are _great._


	14. Chapter 14

**disclaimer: **disclaimed.

**notes: **it'll be lovely once all of the relatives are out of my house, because THEN I CAN GET SHIT DONE.

* * *

**.**

May slid Stein's cell phone across the table to Skye without a word, jaw locked, fingers curling down and around the edge of the tabletop, digging in. Fury and his lackeys were in another section of the hangar and scattered about the plane, all of them searching through different potential leads as to the whereabouts of three missing S.H.I.E.L.D agents.

"What do you want me to do with that?" Skye asked, eyebrows raised as she looked between the phone and May and back again, curious.

"Open it."

They were supposed to be taking the back seat while Fury and the other agents handled their current situation, especially since they had gotten S.H.I.E.L.D into it's current situation. May felt like she was going to crawl out of her skin if she had to sit around any more and wait, wait, wait.

Skye picked up the phone, weighing it in her hand, studying it closely. "Isn't this Frankenstein's? Shouldn't we be handing it over to Fury?"

May pursed her lips; otherwise, her outward expression didn't change.

"Or not," Skye amended quickly, hitting the power button and setting to work. "Definitely not."

* * *

He couldn't believe that she had actually hit him.

He could feel the skin bruising and puffing up where her small hand had made contact, blood still tainting this taste buds. Probing with his tongue, he could feel a few teeth she had knocked loose as well.

Connor had expected her to cry, to faint, to do _anything _but clock him on the jaw with a wild look in her eyes, pearly white teeth bared in strong contrast to the dark, flaky blood that coated her face. He had thought that she would be overjoyed to see him, maybe confused.

But he had _not_ expected her to be so mad that she would punch him.

"I shouldn't have taunted her," he muttered to himself as he navigated the sprawling cliff top compound on his way to the kitchen. He needed to get some kind of cold compress on his semi-deserved wound.

In his pocket, his phone started vibrating, letting out a high pitched beeping noise. Absentmindedly, he dug it out and answered it, not bothering to check the caller ID; only a handful of people had this number, and he was expecting a call from only one of them.

"What?" he snapped into the device, shouldering open the swinging door to the massive chrome and marble kitchen, flicking the light switch as he entered. It was three in the morning; all of the chefs had gone to bed, and Connor was fairly certain he was the only one awake in the place, other than the guards and Chess.

"Well hello to you too, handsome," a slick voice crackled over the phone, tone dry. "And here I was, going to bring you flowers and champagne. What's got your panties in a twist?"

"_Huxley_," Connor hissed, opening up the walk in freezer and snatching up a bag of peas, wincing has he held it up to his jaw. "Business, please."

The man on the line—Huxley—blew a raspberry into the phone before heaving a contemptuous sigh. "A'ight, fine. Coulson's been taken care of, Your Irritatedness. The eagle has landed and all of that jazz. Now _what _is your problem?"

"You forgot to mention a few things while keeping me updated on Chess, Huxley," Connor said acidly. The sharp edge of the counter was biting into the flesh of his back through his suit, biting in between two of the vertebrae of his back. "Like the fact that she's still working with S.H.I.E.L.D, when you told me she was just—how did you put that?-_chilling_ around at our home in Montana."

Connor could hear the hesitation over the phone before Huxley answered easily, voice full of ease. "She was listless when she wasn't with S.H.I.E.L.D, all right? She didn't have anything left to live for, is basically how I'd put it. And she wasn't totally digging the whole mundane medical practice, either. I didn't tell you she went back to S.H.I.E.L.D to be one of their doctors—she only ran extraction when the agents were spread low."

"And the car accident."

"Oh, that? That was baby stuff," Huxley said with a laugh. Connor could still hear the unease in his voice. "I didn't tell you _that_ because you were all busy getting your new life set up after your death, you were still trying to get this whole project off of the ground, you know?"

"Is there anything else you know that you're not telling me, Huxley?"

"Of course not."

Connor could hear the lie clear in his voice.

* * *

The marble floor was no longer cool against her warm skin, the surface she was lying prostrate upon heated by her flesh. Her clothes felt stiff, dirty, her skin grubby with her own blood. She could practically _feel _the grease settling into her hair.

She was lying directly in front of the double doors that were the only plausible escape route inside of the room, cheek pressed to the floor, eyes decidedly unfocused on the sky out of the window, which was still dark in the night. Stein had turned the lights way, way down again to the point that they were almost off, having come to the decision that the glare of the lights off of the polished floor bothered her.

That, and the droplets of blood that were on the floor from where they had flowed from Connor's mouth reminded her that he was, in fact, alive and breathing and fleshy and that she hadn't been hallucinating; that the encounter had actually happened.

She hadn't said much to Ward other than acknowledging the fact that he was, indeed, still in the room. She had curled in on herself for the most part, trying to rationalize why Connor would fake his death, _how_ he had faked his death, and _why_ he had done so without telling her.

He had to have been planning on faking his death before they had even been married; it seemed like the only logical explanation to her, seeing as the man planned everything extensively and in advance, including a multitude of variations in case something went wrong. For Connor Connors to have planned his own death in less than two weeks would have been downright impossible.

With a heavy sigh, she pushed herself up from off of the floor and into a sitting position, leaning against the doors that swung outwards. If anyone were to open them at that very moment, she would fall back and spill into the hallway, though it would be far from the opening she would need for a clean getaway.

She would likely be shot before she even made it down the hall. It would have been folly to try and run anyway, given she didn't know the layout of the place she was in, let alone how large it was. She could tell from the location on the cliff, however, that it was meant to be safe and more secure than an S.H.I.E.L.D base.

Not that it would matter too much; S.H.I.E.L.D bases were built to keep people out, not in. It still wouldn't do her any good to make a run for it, since she didn't have any clue as to where she was going.

She would have to get Ward out, too—based on Connor's comments and the way the two of them had been abducted, Stein would have bet money that Ward was simply collateral damage in the whole mess. Now that she had seen Connor, she could kind of make sense of why she was taken from the warehouse—because of him. She wasn't, however, sure if he was a part of Centipede or if he had just happened to pick that specific warehouse on a whim.

Nothing would make sense until she asked him, but there was _no way_ she was going to have a civil conversation with that son of a bitch. There was also no way he was going to get whatever it was he wanted with her, even if he had someone holding an ax to her neck, ready to decapitate her without a second thought.

Stein shifted, crossing her legs and folding them closer to her body. Her bladder felt like it was close to exploding—damn the human body and it's need to relieve itself. She had already evaluated her options on _that_ situation, and none of them looked promising. It seemed to be pee her pants, wait for Connor or someone to come back and ask for a potty break, or use one of the ficus like some kind of dog.

There wasn't any way she was going to use a ficus as a restroom.

From outward appearances, Ward didn't seem to be suffering from the same problem. He was going over the room again, looking to see if either of them had missing something, anything that might lead to a way out. From his sour expression that Stein could only half make out in the dark, she figured he still wasn't finding anything.

"It might be easier to figure out that there's no way out if we turned up the lights," Stein suggested sarcastically, waving one arm toward the light panel. She rolled her eyes at the glare Ward shot her before he went back to rifling through one of the ficus. "It might also be simpler if we just ruled out the ficus entirely, because I highly doubt there's enough room in one of those pots for some kind of secret escape tunnel."

And then she stopped, arm hanging in the air where it had motioned to the light panel, thinking. When she and Connor had bought their house together, he had insisted on safe rooms, escape routes so they wouldn't ever be trapped in one single room should something happen, even if it was on the second floor.

"Wait a second!" Stein stood quickly, bracing herself against the door before turning the lights on full power, squinting at the sudden brightness. "Can we move the ficus? Like, shift the pot over and whatnot?"

She strode quickly toward the ficus closest to her, biting the insides of her cheeks. "Connor is a fan of trap doors and escape tunnels," she explained hurriedly as she bent over and braced her hands on the lip of the pot. "And since those windows don't open, it would be safe to say that there's a chance one such thing exists beneath these monstrous plants."

**.**

* * *

**notes2: **I had originally planned to have all of this written by now, but that kind of went south so now I have to play catch up.

**notes3: **you're all lovely people and I really love you guys.


	15. Chapter 15

**disclaimer: **disclaimed.

**notes: **the one thing I don't like about writing in the winter/fall is that it's incredibly hard to type while wrapped up in a cocoon of blankets; also, football season.

* * *

**.**

Skye whistled lowly as she looked through the contents of the phone that belonged to one Francesca Stein, drawing the attention of May.

"What?" the elder agent asked. It had only been twenty minutes since she had slid Skye Stein's phone.

"Uh, nothing," Skye answered, glancing up at May before looking back to the screen of the phone. "It's just, Doctor Frankenstein has a little Frankenstein, and he's pretty cute."

"What?" May repeated, coming around the table to look at the smart phone.

"She has a kid," Skye said, holding the phone out to May. On the screen was a photo of a child with a large, cheeky grin stuck on his face, a front tooth missing. His strawberry blond hair was spiked up in the front, amber colored eyes that matched his mothers crinkled at the edges.

May hadn't been aware of the fact that Stein had given birth to a child. It was obvious to her who the father was, given how much his smile and the shape of his face resembled Connor's. Now that she saw the picture, of course, Stein's soccer mom comment in the SUV made much more sense than it had earlier.

"His name is Crash," a voice said from the doorway. Skye jumped; May's head whipped toward the man who took up a majority of the doorway. He looked too large for his tailored suit, nearly like he had miraculously stuffed himself into it. "Well, Gale. But we all just call him Crash."

"Who are you?" Skye asked slowly, unsure of what was going on. He hadn't been near Fury and the other S.H.I.E.L.D lackeys—she would have remembered the bear of a man who appeared to big to even fit on the plane.

"Agent Huxley Rian," he supplied easily, smiling. "At your service."

"What are you doing here?" May demanded. She had seen his name in files, when she had still been Stein's SO. He had been sent on a number of missions with both Stein and a dead agent by the name of Connor Connors, though May had never met him herself.

"They haven't told you yet?" he asked, surprised.

"Told us what?" Skye inquired, setting Stein's phone down on the table top slowly.

"We found Coulson wandering on the side of the road two, three hours from here. I just brought him in."

* * *

Unfortunately, they found no trap door or escape tunnels and Stein still had to pee.

"That was disappointing," she griped, pulling the chair she had been standing on hours ago back it's place at the table with the already set chess board and slumping down into it. The sun was starting to rise outside, tinting the sky a million shades of red and pink and purple and blue. The water was still dark, blue-black and immense, a blob in the poor lighting.

She had been so sure that Connor would have put some kind of way out into the room, given how paranoid the man tended to be. Unless that was just some kind of front he had put up in the eight years they had been partnered together, though she couldn't see how it could have been. She was well aware of how hard cover stories were to hold up, even if it was just for a few months. Connor tended to muck his up, too—he wouldn't have been able to hold one up for more than a month, let alone eight years at close quarters.

"In fact," she continued, picking up the one of the kings from the chess set and rolling it around in her hands, "the past twenty four or so hours have been disappointing. Coulson goes missing, a warehouse explodes, _we_ get kidnapped, and my dead husband is miraculously alive and behind at least one of the aforementioned things."

Ward had taken up residence on the couch again, once their search had proved fruitless. He and Stein had gone so far as to move the couch and look under the rug—under which there was nothing—and had neglected to move the couch back to it's original position.

Connor had to know they would search; it would be useless to pretend they hadn't.

So now the couch was set at an awkward angle facing the door, half of it on the paisley rug and the other half on the cool grey marble of the floor.

"Dead husband?"

"Connor—the one I punched, y'know? Tall, blond, wears a suit, sounds like a jackass. _That_ one. He's a prime example of why you don't date or screw other agents; things end, they get awkward, you get emotionally compromised in the field and there's tons of dirty laundry all over the place. It just doesn't pay off, honestly."

Although it kind of _did_ pay off, in Stein's opinion. But she wasn't going to admit that bit out loud, especially since there could have very well been listening bugs in the room that they hadn't uncovered. She wanted to stay on the safe side, just in case.

Because there was _no way_ he was going to find out about their kid.

Stein was more than prepared to take the fact that she and Connor had a son to the grave. She wasn't going to tell him, wasn't going to give him any more leverage over her, was _not_ going to inform him that he had missed six and a half years of her attempting to raise a child who was way, way more normal than either of his parents.

"Or," she continued, rolling the king around in her hands, fingers probing every delicate curve of the glass chess piece, "they die. And then things get really messy, but lack the awkward confrontations. Neither route is suggested."

Stein paused, lips pursed as she looked at the tinted black king closely. Then she held it up and asked, "If we made a shank out of this, do you think it'd be enough to fight our way out of the room?"

Ward frowned at her, which she took as a "no." Besides Connor, there were two guards on the door, and there were sure to be more from where they came from. Taking down three grown men with a shank would be difficult, even with the element of surprise involved. It was difficult to say what could happen after that.

Stein knew that it wouldn't be entirely smart to try and escape armed with a chess piece, but she and Connor had done stupider things and miraculously lived to tell the tale. She wasn't entirely sure _how_ they had lived through a couple of close calls, likely because she had tried to block out any and all memories that pertained to stupid ideas.

With a sigh, she placed the king back on the chess board from whence it had came, leaning back in her chair and resting her chin on her hand.

Absentmindedly, she tipped the king over, sending him clinking to the metal top of the chess board among the other pieces.

**.**

* * *

**notes2: **finally, my house is empty again (unless you count the cats).

**notes3: **you guys are really, truly awesome; I love you all.


End file.
